You can always count on the New Yorker cartoon to cut to the heart of things. One of its latest cartoons depicts a game show appropriately named Facts Don’t Matter. There are two contestants, male and female. The woman with the correct answer is timed out as the game show host proclaims, ‘I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.’

US President-elect Donald Trump seems to be making policy via Twitter-storms and announces his cabinet as if they were finalists in a reality television show. Thoughtfulness, depth, reason and decency have left the room.

Here in South Africa, we seem to have inhabited a post-truth world long before it became the fashionable “word of 2016”. The governing ANC and the Zuma administration are old hands at this cognitive “dab”. It was, after all, President Zuma’s minion, Minister of Police Nathi Nhleko, who gave us the (in)famous “fire-pool”, after all.

That the ConCourt found that Zuma breached the Constitution seemed a trifle to Zuma’s henchmen and women as they sought to downplay the excesses of Nkandla. Instead, they found a convenient defence – attack the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela. She was surely a CIA spy, after all, remember? What proof was there of this? None. But in the post-fact world, he who shouts the loudest wins the argument or tries to dominate the discourse anyway.

The Guptas landed an aircraft at Waterkloof Air Force Base without requisite permission and we are told this is a trifle. The state seems virtually captured by the same Guptas demanding the appointment of Cabinet ministers and we are asked to believe that 9/12 was a figment of our collective imagination.

Really, Nhlanhla Nene was gearing up for a job with the BRICS Bank all along. Said job has yet to materialise. And then, most recently, the ANC secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, tried to convince us that the ANC NEC meeting on the possible recall of Zuma was “not special”. We were also told that “unity” was all-important. This when it is patently obvious that the ANC is split down the middle and as paralysed by Zuma as he is by it.

There are plenty of other examples where those running interference for Zuma, whether on “paid Twitter” or elsewhere, simply engage in a version of events that is untrue. In this world, Zuma is a victim and the real “enemy” is “white monopoly capital”, religious leaders or civil society conspirators.

But it’s not only those who wish to protect Zuma who sometimes engage without reference to facts, it has become part of the political milieu we live in now. Shouting loudest has often become the preferred way of getting the point across. Everything seems to be a zero-sum game in South African politics and public life. We are either trenchantly for or against. The middle way is lost somehow, the centre does not hold. Gone is the Aristotelian wisdom of the “educated mind” being able to “entertain a thought without accepting it”.

There was a time when reason dominated discourse and compromise was a way out of the intractability of apartheid. This year we are reminded of this especially as we celebrate 20 years of the adoption of our final Constitution and also three years since Nelson Mandela’s passing.

This has been a fraught year for South Africa as we have felt most keenly the weight of inequality, poor leadership, corruption and the concomitant policy paralysis. The story is well worn and our President sits at the heart of our discontent. It was also a year marked by an ANC that found itself wanting at the polls, yet unable to fully grasp what that might mean for the national elections in 2019.

The #FeesMustFall movement laid bare government’s inability to rise to the occasion and provide steady leadership when the youth were asking for it. Zuma unfortunately does not have the credibility to lead on anything really, given how ethically compromised he himself is. Laudable as the aims of the #FeesMustFall movement are, it has also, in part, become fractured, fractious, violent and often intolerant. We witnessed the burning of libraries and artwork and very little leadership to hold those responsible to account.

Into the leadership vacuum, untruth, violence, burning and general confusion fall.

A popular trope in the #FeesMustFall and other movements is that Mandela was a “sell-out” and the Constitution a poor, liberal compromise which is not worth the paper it is written on. Yet, we must ask whether we presume to blame the Constitution that calls for open, responsive and accountable government for the corruption prevalent in government?

It is easy to dismiss Mandela as the warm, fuzzy “Tata” we came to love in his retirement, the one who met the stars and asked who the Spice Girls were. But to only focus on that would be trivialising his legacy as a revolutionary. It also displays some ignorance of the geo-political conditions that prevailed in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and which propelled South Africa to its negotiated settlement. In the post-truth world, Mandela can be labelled a sell-out quite thoughtlessly. It’s an ill-informed analysis which the facts of Mandela’s life do not bear out.

The scapegoating of the Constitution is equally concerning because it does not truly engage with many of the deeply progressive Constitutional Court judgments that have been handed down since 1996. Yet, given the high levels of inequality, the argument can be compelling in a populist way. The ANC itself has also sought to undermine the Constitution when it suited its political needs. Who can forget Ngoako Ramathlodi’s questioning of the Constitution and the courts and their “enormous power”?

Last week former deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke was in Cape Town for the launch of his beautiful memoir, My Own Liberator. The book is a wonderful journey through Moseneke’s life and rich in the quotidian detail of his childhood. He was as much family man as legal man and the contours of his life as a 15-year-old prisoner on Robben Island, learning Latin conjugations while pushing a wheelbarrow around, is an inspiration. Moseneke tells of his solitary confinement at 15 and the violence of those times. Throughout, of course, education was the weapon of choice in prison and he indeed was his own liberator. At the launch, a few student Fallists sought to interrogate Moseneke on the Constitution, the failure of the state and then levelled some accusations at university authorities. The temperature in the room was beginning to rise as a well-known Fallist from UCT took the microphone and shouted his question. One wondered where the respect was?

That was until Moseneke took the questions and answered them all with empathy but also with the authority of his position as an elder in our society. He spoke of how the apartheid government had tried to kill him three times, of his solitary confinement and the uncertainty of not knowing where your comrades were and whether they were
“singing like birds” while you were being beaten. He questioned how one could compare the rights enjoyed in a democracy to the apartheid state. Most important, though, were his words that no “revolution” the students were speaking of so casually could come out of chaos and burning.

He cited examples of universities elsewhere on the continent that have been ruined as a result of constant protest and the inability to hear the other side. Universities, he said, were “soft targets”. It is, after all, the state that has been decreasing university subsidies over the past 15 years. And then, with a sure, authoritative voice, he called for the debate to be conducted with respect as opposed to shouting and name-calling. The latter is often the easy way out when the facts don’t fit the case. One could hear the proverbial pin drop.

Here was dignified leadership writ large. But Moseneke could only make that intervention because he himself had lived through what he did and because his personal integrity gave him legitimacy. Most of our leaders have no integrity and so shouting and disrespect is easy. One need only watch Presidential Question Time to see that playing out in Parliament.

And it was that integrity which set Nelson Mandela apart. Who could forget the day of Chris Hani’s assassination when Madiba’s calm words on national television surely brought us back from the edge of the abyss? Who could forget the day in Durban in 1990 when he said, “My message is this: Take your guns, your knives, your pangas and throw them into the sea.” Who else but Mandela could have said that? And what was the alternative at that point? A civil war?

The transition was fraught and mistakes were made. Mandela himself would have been the first to admit that. But his presidency was defining in its commitment to reconciliation, the Constitution and the rule of law. The economic restitution or the “second phase” of the transition is one we are grappling with now. Much of our discontent however is as a result of poor leadership, corruption and an ANC that is coming dangerously apart at the seams. The Constitution has, during these difficult times, in fact been a bulwark of protection against the further looting of the state.

As we experience the leadership void, there are several questions we need to ask of ourselves as beneficiaries of not only Madiba’s powerful legacy but of those like Moseneke. In the book, Moseneke asks whether the struggle “was in vain”? We should all in turn ask what it requires of us. And so perhaps our greatest gift to those who paved the way is to do all we can to protect and defend the Constitution and deepen our understanding of the principles that underpinned it. It also means grappling with the areas of the Constitution that are problematic. That contestation is healthy and necessary for democracy to flourish.

But, the reminder remains: that nothing good rises from burning and shouting except confusion, silencing of the other, and anarchy.

Mandela, Moseneke and their peers took the high road; it’s time we did the same. DM