Real freedom still eludes most South Africans

I DESPERATELY wanted to give a feel- good answer when asked by a talk show host what I made of Freedom Day on Tuesday. There is so much we have achieved since apartheid’s demise that counts in favour of warm and fuzzy celebrations.

We are free to sleep with someone who looks different from ourselves. We are free to roam the streets of any suburb. We are free to buy property anywhere. We are free to vote in regular elections. We are free to write what we like. We are free to speak our minds. We are free to form political parties.

We are, it would seem, free to be who we truly want to be.

Freedom seems alive and well in this weird and wonderful country of ours. Add a vuvuzela, a Bafana Bafana shirt and a 750ml bottle of Castle Lager all set to the Toto song, Miss the rains down in Africa, and only pre-prison Eugene TerreBlanche would not feel positively drunk with the insatiable taste of democratic freedom.

But, sorry to spoil the image folks, it is all a big fat lie. A big, fat, unsustainable lie. We’d better own up to reality and step up our national game if we are to avoid looking like a team ranked 90th in the world.

The vast majority of Saffers have not yet experienced Uhuru. The rest of us have no right to celebrate. We have only a right to feel survivor’s guilt.

Freedom is a tricky concept that has kept nerdish political philosophers busy for centuries. Isaiah Berlin, a former Oxford philosopher, distinguished between positive and negative liberty way back in 1958.

For our purposes, we can think of liberty as more or less a fancy term for freedom. Negative freedom means there are no obstacles in your way.

I am not, for example, preventing you from forming a political party by passing a law that says whoever reads this week’s column by McKaiser in Business Day is forbidden from forming a political party. That kind of law would rob you of negative freedom. It would place an obstacle in your path.

Positive freedom, on the other hand, is the presence of something as opposed to the absence of an obstacle. For example, if I give you money to form a political party and to put together a campaign, I am thereby giving you positive freedom. I am placing you in a position to use your negative freedom to effectively pursue goals you value but which could not be pursued in the absence of certain enabling conditions. It is because we value positive freedom that public goods such as education are important. They constitute positive freedom. They enable you to live a full life of your own choosing rather than leaving you free merely to dream.

Here is the unsexy result of this Politics 101 detour. The reason I experience survivor’s guilt on Freedom Day as a black middle-class intelligentsia type is that the vast majority of South Africans do not enjoy positive freedom. They merely enjoy negative freedom.

But negative freedom is pointless. Or, at the risk of self-declared elders rapping me over the knuckles, negative freedom is important but should not be the ultimate point of why we destroyed apartheid.

Yes, the freedom to vote, to live where you want to, to have sex with whoever agrees, to form political parties, to speak your mind and to associate with whom you wish to, are critically important. But we fought for positive freedom. Surely?

If a young Rolihlahla in Qunu is free to live in Houghton but lacks access to goods such as decent education, which would enable him to have a shot at earning power that would in turn lead to him being able to afford a house in Houghton, then Rolihlahla may as well as still be living in an apartheid state.

Negative freedom is what we get excited about on Freedom Day. It is what we wash down our braaied meat with. But we should keep our eye on the deeper goal of liberal democracy, which is the enjoyment of positive freedom by every single South African. In a slogan, we still need social justice for all before we can declare SA a country in which substantive, positive freedom is enjoyed across the country. But how the heck do we get there?

This is a complex question that deserves more than a blog inch or three devoted to it. Forgive my terse suggestion for now. We will get to substantive freedom by doing at least two things.

First, our state is sickly. It suffers from systemic corruption, cronyism and tenderpreneurship.

This needs to stop and be replaced with a new culture of merit- based, career civil service. If there is no political will to effect this change, then let’s vote for a different government.


Second, we need to take responsibility for our own wellbeing. Yes, it is false to claim that most poor people are poor due to laziness or unstrategic life choices. But a mix of a welfare cushion and Steve Biko-inspired psychological independence and self-actualisation could make a huge difference. Democratic SA may have turned 16 this week but it was far from a sweet birthday occasion.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=107592