Sometime during the early 1990s, the African National Congress’s Joe Modise, who would become democratic South Africa’s first defence minister, visited Singapore. On the way back to his hotel, sometime after midnight, he saw a two or three small groups of young men and women walking on a sidewalk, presumably on their way home. Sitting in the back of a car, Modise turned to his host, one of the elders of the Singaporean state, and said: “This is what we want to see in South Africa; young people feeling safe and secure in their lives, and being able to walk the streets at night.”
There are no prizes for guessing what has happened since then, since those heady days when we mistook our own irrational exuberance, hope and genuine optimism for eternal brightness. Who would have guessed?
I remembered Modise’s comments a few days ago, as I left my office at the institute where I have spent the past five months on a writing sabbatical. Before I turned out the lights in the library, I looked at the place, and noticed, not for the first time, that people had left laptop computers, bags, books, pens, a bicycle helmet and other personal items on their desks. I flicked the lights on and off a few times, smiled and muttered something about safety to myself, as I am wont to do, and walked to the bus stop. On the way, I decided to walk home along the river, a three kilometre journey that sometimes takes me more than an hour as I stop along the shore. Sometimes I stop at a restaurant along the way, to watch the sun set across the Siebengebirge, a row of seven low mountains that lie along the Rhine, South East of Bonn. It’s really quite idyllic. I have yet to feel guilty, though, for enjoying the tranquillity. It is especially pleasurable, now that I know I will be returning to the barricades, gantries, electric fences, burglar bars, alarm systems, and the gauntlet of hustlers and hawkers on the highways, potholes, dysfunctional traffic lights and taxis climbing onto the sidewalks during rush hour.
Like someone about to enter prison, I am starting to enjoy the small freedoms and pleasures of living in a society where people usually follow the rule of law. Indeed, I marvel, like a visitor from another planet, at people – young and old, big and small, grumpy and light – lining up, side by side, waiting for the light to turn green, before crossing the road.
Forget, that there were no cars passing in the first place. Never mind, then, what humourless Marxists, puerile post-modernists and third world groupies may tell us – not to mention the apologists for the multiplicity of failures in the delivery of public goods and services – there is no romance, spiritual closeness, or ‘earthiness’ in poverty, misery, dysfunctionality and social breakdown. One has to be thoroughly deluded to accept, when you come home from a hard day’s work, after a two- or three-hour commute to Orange Farm, or a 20-minute drive to Pretoria East, for that matter, that your house, is flooded with sewage, because technicians from the local government did not know the difference between influent and effluent, or between sewage and sewerage, because these things matter naught; or that the food in your refrigerator has turned into junk because of power failures caused by early colonialists in the 17th century; or that a taxi has crashed through a barrier and killed 10 people, because the driver was drunk, and his driver’s licence was bought from a street vendor on Rockey Street. We must be devoid of any sense of humanity, if we’re not repulsed by the way valuables are being stripped from the corpse of our decaying society.
As Modise said all those years ago, we all want to live and work, and raise our children, nurse the elderly in a safe and clean environment. Okay, he did not say that, exactly, but we can extrapolate from what he did, in fact, say. Never the most loquacious, my information is that Modise was singularly impressed by the achievements of the Singaporeans, and could not stop talking about them.
So, as I pack my books over the coming weeks (if you read the first of the apercus I have been writing over the past few months, you may detect a pattern), I flick the lights on and off, drink fresh water from the tap, watch the children play in their sandboxes, ride the buses and trains, and generally make the most of material conveniences before I return to South Africa.
Of course, I can curse and cuss everyone in the streets of Bonn, and tell them how they take electricity and running water for granted. I can tell the children around the neighbourhood that they should stop laughing and stop enjoying the sunlight because somewhere someone is suffering, or because their great-grandparents were part of an oppressive system. I can address them in an open letter, address them as ‘Dear German people’, and speak to them, vaingloriously (as some open letter writers tend to do) in some pretentious remake of Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians, telling them how privileged they are, and that they should, therefore, repent. In other words, I can just generally be a twat ...
Now then, my time here is coming to a close. On Monday I gave my penultimate lecture (on global governance), next week I deliver the last (on global inequality), and at the end of the month I return to South Africa. While I spent much of the sabbatical working on the book, which is on global inequality and the shortcomings of the Neo-Classical Economics model, I spent a lot of time reflected on South Africa. In particular, I tried to work out how we got from the measured optimism and the excitement of the early 1990s, when I tracked the legislative dissolution of the old system from the Parliamentary Press Gallery, and the slow and painful birth of the new order, in negotiating chambers across the country, to the despair of today.
One is tempted, always, to come up with definitive answers. My alma mater has the slogan, ‘to know the causes of things’. Well, it’s not that easy. Sometimes, when I look at the problems that beset South Africa, I come back to laziness, and the understanding that if you get things for free, or without working for them, you will, well, not be arsed to take care of them, or to work hard to build something – anything.
Laziness and the lack of strong work ethic is, of course, not unique to South Africa, but senses of entitlement are a disincentive … In a remarkable statement, reflecting on his 22 years as Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad lamented the fact that Malays no longer felt ashamed of their failures – and that they were ‘lazy’. He accepted some of the blame for not changing ‘the mentality’ of Malays, who constantly complained that non-Malays (mainly Chinese Malaysians) were doing better than them.
“I spent 22 years trying to change the Malays but I admit I failed … If anyone asks me today, I would have to say Malays are lazy,” he said. He pointed out that Malays had been awarded places in institutions of higher learning, but did not make full use of their time, and failed to focus on their education – first. The Chinese Malaysians, who have fewer opportunities because of affirmative action, simply studied harder and worked harder.
“What I am ashamed of is that when some Malay workers see money, they forget themselves and their values. They see money and if they can steal it, they steal it. The are not like this,” he told the newspaper Mingguan Malaysia in September last year. He said Malays had a diabolical attitude to debts, and simply refused to repay them.
“How many Malays are there who refuse to settle their debts? They receive scholarships and student loans, but refuse to pay back. This is not a question of being unable to, they have the money, but just refuse to honour their commitments. We must be honest.”
Mahathir explained that dishonesty was one of the reasons why contracts had been awarded to the Chinese community; because they were more honest than Malays.
“When we issue a contract, we give it to the Chinese because we know they will keep their word and do a good job. That is the weakness of the Malays, we lack honesty.” He said he criticised the Malay community because he did not want to lie to himself, and that it was better to face up to reality.
When former president Nelson Mandela visited Malaysia, he was singularly impressed with the early efforts of affirmative action and entitlements aimed at creating an indigenous bourgeoisie. This, it seems, has come back to bite Mahathir, and his country on the arse. Still, there is hope for Malaysia, as there is for Singapore.
Across the causeway from the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia lies the island state of Singapore, where Modise admired the clean and safe streets all those years ago. It is certainly true that the cost of living in a place like Singapore is high. It can also be said, though, that there is a higher price to pay for living in any of the thousands of squatter camps in South Africa. There are three weeks to go, before I leave for South Africa. Outside it’s cold and rainy and windy and miserable, in South Africa we have braai vleis, sunny skies and Mercedes-Benzes. DM