Marxian+Godsell

Business Day, 06 May 2005
=Let the nation speak — and listen=


 * Bobby Godsell**

WHAT is an African democratic discourse? Democracy requires both institutions and activities: constitutions, parliaments, courts, elections. But these are the vessels, the wineskins if you like. The wine of democracy is the discourse, the dialogue, the conversations, which, in my view, are also its greatest and most important substance.

The African democratic dialogue we need requires three things. We require the space for all voices to be heard. We need the freedom to speak. We need this freedom both for ourselves, but equally for others. Democracy is a marketplace filled with many voices.

A second prerequisite is the capacity and willingness of all social actors to listen, as well as to speak. The right to speak is of little value if it is not accompanied by the right to be heard. Equally, without genuine listening, political discourse becomes a dialogue of the deaf. In SA’s transition this speaking and hearing went well beyond the formal political process. Workers had to find their voice, and management had to use its ears.

The third requirement for democratic discourse requires participants to go beyond speaking and hearing. Parties must be driven by a desire not only to hear but to explore, delineate and define those things on which agreement is possible. It is the will to find agreement that is the characteristic of SA’s and African democratic discourse. This discourse is not primarily about who is right or wrong. It must include the freedom to vigorously criticise and contest, and to enter radical alternatives. We need a democracy that aspires to the goals of freedom, justice, and that promise which the African National Congress made in 1994, but which more properly belongs to the democratic process itself, of a better life for all.

In this regard we need to go beyond the sterile debate common in many advanced democracies, beyond the personality and television charisma contests of presidential-style politics, beyond the “he said, she said” ping-pong debate on the marriage already on the rocks. The futility of such debate has been well analysed in the book by Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture. It has contributed to the low levels of electoral participation in most developed democracies. It is the source of disillusionment with politics in many industrialised and postindustrial societies.

On our continent there is a deep history of allowing dialogue to continue until sufficient agreement is achieved to allow for collective effort and action.

Why does an African democratic discourse matter? There are at least three reasons. First, this is often the best and sometimes only way of finding out what actually is going on. I am sure this is a driving reason for the imbizo visits that are such a central part of the Mbeki presidency. I know from corporate life that it is tempting and comfortable to silence dissident voices. It is also easy. But organisations switch off their radar screens when they do so, normally with disastrous effects.

Second: no one party, person or movement has a monopoly on the truth. The questions that matter for our society now are:


 * How to build an inclusive African and South African identity that includes blackness and whiteness, Indianness and colouredness, Xhosaness and Afrikanerness.
 * How to achieve inclusive growth where two economies truly become one.
 * How to achieve health care that is both world-class and broadly available.
 * How to deal with the AIDS pandemic.

These questions are beyond ideology, beyond race, beyond class. They require collective analysis and response. Without a robust, inclusive dialogue we will neither find effective solutions, nor implement them effectively.

Third, when voices are silenced, thoughts are not. And neither are emotions. It is clear that disruptive social action is not just a feature of SA’s past. A pattern of violent protest is evident across the country. The Congress of South African Trade Unions is threatening a national protest over job losses and the strong rand. When discussion fails, more costly forms of mobilisation take over. The alternative to talking is often fighting, a costly alternative.

One concluding thought. It is about how we know the difference between real and phony dialogue. The difference is captured in the elegant concept argued in the Habib and Schultz-Herzenberg chapter of the Institute for Democracy in SA (Idasa) book, Democracy in the Time of Mbeki. The concept is that of “political uncertainty” and, specifically, “substantive uncertainty”. A dialogue is real when its conclusion cannot be predicted.

If parties are not ready to contemplate an outcome other than that which they cherish, dialogue cannot be real.

To borrow from the Marxian tool kit, democracy can never flourish in society’s superstructure, in the institutions which organise the exercise of power, if it is not alive and well in society’s base. That base is the dialogue of everyday life. If in economy and society, South Africans are not ready to let others speak, to hear what they say, and to seek some measure of agreement between the views of the other and their own, then democracy cannot survive in Parliament or the media.


 * Godsell is CEO of AngloGold Ashanti. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the launch of the Idasa book at Constitution Hill last week.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A42658**