By Masiza Ngculu
In 1906, Pixley ka-Isaka Seme defiantly asserted (in a seminal piece that won him the highest honour in an annual essay competition at Columbia University, USA) that: ‘I am an African’.
Some ninety (90) years later in 1996, on the occasion of adoption of South Africa’s democratic Constitution, President Mbeki famously re-interpreted the seminal piece – ‘I am an African’ – ending with the optimistic declaration: ‘Today, it feels good to be an African!’.
Out of habit, I tend to follow African politics closely. Every time African leaders meet, they are wont to complain about the ‘dependency syndrome’ fostered by the ‘development aid’ their countries receive from the rest of the world. A binary and less often stated twin of this dependency is the corruption and a sense of entitlement by the elite classes in African societies. Such elite classes tend to be main beneficiaries of this ‘development aid’ finance.
I was reminded of these two sets of seemingly disparate occurances as we were expressing our disgust as staff members at the welter of spurious requests for petty cash from all sorts of student clubs. Whether one wants to organize a prayer service with friends, a meeting, a recruitment drive …. any excuse whatsoever, the hand is forever stretched out seeking to receive some money!
These students we so studiedly train in the baser arts of dependency and entitlement are one day to graduate and be set loose on the rest of society. Some of them might end up as public representatives, others as public servants.
One shudders to think how they would relate to the public bourse after such comprehensive tutelage at disdain for public funds. No sense of whence the funds emanate; what the priorities ought to be; or guilt (from their own moral compass) and consequences (from the Institutional practice) when these are misappropriated are detected in all their relationship with the public funds.
In fact the demands for yet more money are accompanied by a subtle insinuation of mayhem and all manner of threats if the demands are not met. These threats may come as a reminder that the strike is not yet over; or a threat to expose such ineptitude on the part of the staff member to the highest authorities for daring to deny him/her what is rightfully due; or a threatening language and body language that might be enough warning that such steadfastness to principle might come at the pain of physical injury….
Writing in 1651, Thomas Hobbes famously said “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as is of every man against every man….To this war of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where there is no law, no injustice. Force and fraud, are in war cardinal virtues… No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all – continual fear and danger of violent death: and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (my emphasis).
Instead of that social compact (or in Hobbes’ words ‘common power to keep us all in awe’) we are entreated to an Orwellian newspeak. In this newspeak, gluttonous consumption and ostentatious exhibitions of opulence by a few are extolled as a vicarious victory and benefit for the rest. Being the envy of the rest is a poignant lesson in leadership! An indecent fixation with being a model in whose opulent image others ought to hanker is peddled as being a role model! Hence the golf-shirts, the demands of ‘incentives’, the cars, the VIP lounges in student functions… some are more equal than others really!
How about for once chancing calling a shovel a spade? This all looks like cultivation of dependency, a culture of entitlement, cultivation of the cult of the personality, looting of the public funds all abetted by an Institutional culture of permissiveness. A corrupt mess really.
“I am an African… Today it feels good to be an African…”
I am sorry, these lofty ideals of our forebears seem to be either lost or deliberately betrayed. What we see is more like “All snouts to the trough, let the feeding frenzy continue!” Or as the cartoonist Jeremy Nell famously reinterpreted the statement attributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette (let them eat cake) as having been further vulgarized to ‘qu’ils mangent de la marde!’.
[Mr Masiza Ngculu is the Student Life Officer at the Durban University of Technology in Pietermaritzburg Campus,]
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