The ANC really has mastered the art of confusing ambition with achievement. The jubilation and celebrations on the liberation movement’s birthday, during policy or provincial conferences, have become ends in themselves. They have become reason to celebrate. There seems to be a clear misunderstanding of the insignificance of meetings, and of the relative meaningless of the creation of committees.

At the highest levels of government, too, creating an “interministerial committee” or a “war room” is no great achievement – not until some tangible and meaningful change or transformation has taken place as a result of these creations.

Out on the streets, there is increased hostility towards the governing alliance, something more than an exasperation. It’s a combination of anger, fear, surrender and something verging on defiance. In the meantime, we are left with only imaginaries of the society we were promised three decades ago.

I recently read Teju Cole’s marvellous and deeply insightful book, Every Day Is for the Thief, in which the writer travels to Nigeria, his ancestral land, from his home in the United States. The book, which is nothing short of brilliant, is as reflective (the writer ponders his own place in the world) as it is reflexive – Nigeria, especially Lagos, drains Cole, and leaves him wondering whether he could live in this bustling African city.

I have no doubt that Cole’s observations would resonate with most South Africans. It’s worth citing brief passages of the book to get a sense of where Cold finds himself, and how he responds to his surroundings.

Between the lack of a word processor, intermittent electricity supply, the daily grind of meeting people and visiting places, and nighttime filled with the smell of diesel – used for power generation – and “loud singing from the churches in the middle distance … writing is difficult, reading impossible”, Cole writes with a sense of exasperation and surrender.

During his visit, he observes that people are exhausted by the “hassle of a normal Lagos day” and turn to mindless entertainment, “the secret price paid for all those cumulative stresses” of life in the city. At the end of each day, he writes, “the mind is worn, the body ragged”. And yet, he explains, “the place exerts an elementary pull on me. There is no end to fascinations. People talk all the time, calling on a sense of reality that is not identical to mine.”

Most people in Lagos are resilient and resourceful – in South Africa, this has a ring of truth because of a governing alliance that seems to live on a distant planet in the furthest reaches of the observable universe – and have “a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world”. There is, at the same time, a sorrow “in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses until they do things that they themselves find hateful until they are shadows of their best selves”.

Then, remarkably homologous to South Africa today, Cole writes that “the problem used to be only the leadership. But now, when you step out into the city, your oppressor is likely to be your fellow citizen, his ethics eroded by years of suffering and life at the cusp of desperation. There is venality in abundance here, and the general air of surrender, of helplessness, is the most heartbreaking thing about it.”

When I finished reading the book, I read about the horrific rape of eight women in Krugersdorp, the most callous comments about the violent ordeal of the women by the Police Minister, Bheki Cele, and received news that one of my nephews had been hijacked, kidnapped and held for several hours to drain his bank account overnight – he was beat up, with the most awful of damage to the hand and arm he used to block the attempted butchery.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in South Africa who would not agree that the country’s problems are “the leadership” as well as the oppressive “fellow citizen [whose] ethics [have been] eroded by years of suffering and life at the cusp of desperation”, as Cole wrote about his time in Lagos.

We may be forgiven to ask what has the government done to alleviate this rampant oppression in South Africa that ravages the body and destroys the soul of the most vulnerable. Cole finds a key in a response to his malarial condition: “Relax, God is in control,” a friend tells him.

“I find a key to much of what I have been observing in the preceding weeks [he writes on the day of his return to the United States where he lives]. The idea that saying makes it so. That the laws of the imagination matter more than all others.”

And so when we hear, or we see, South Africa’s governing alliance in unabashed jollification at conferences and celebrations, you want to imagine we live in a country that is at peace with itself, where there is a shared wealth, prosperity, wellbeing, with high levels of trust among the population.

The best we can do is imagine it so. In Every Day Is for the Thief, Cole notes a phrase he often hears in Nigeria, idea l’a need, which he describes as “all we need is the general idea or concept… It’s a way of saying: that’s good enough, there’s no need to be get bogged down in details. I hear it all the time. After the electrician installs an antenna and all we get is unclear reception of one station, CNN, instead of the 30 pristine stations we had been promised, the reaction isn’t that he has done an incomplete job. It is, rather, we’ll make do, after all idea l’a need… And once, driving in town with one of the school drivers, I discover the latch for the seat belt is broken. Oh, pull it across your chest and sit on the buckle, he says, idea l’a need. Safety is not the point. The semblance of safety is what we are after.”

This idea l’a need is precisely what we seem to have in South Africa, with respect to a governing alliance that came with the promise, three decades ago, of a better life for all. Having it all, to paraphrase Cole (perhaps unfortunately), is not the point. All we have to do is pretend, or imagine that we live in a country that thrives on democracy, justice for all, shared wealth and prosperity, community safety.

As for the governing alliance, which cannot be separated from the state, they continue the jollification and performativity which have come to represent the end point or the delivery of their promise of “a better life for all”.

As a population we rely on idea l’a need. There is no need to have it all, if you can imagine it all. It is too soon for us to say, the problem once was “the leadership”. It’s better, I think, to say that we are all in the same boat; we will either survive or sink together. DM