You must pepper and litter your speech with words of praise and gratitude.
A lot of the times you must describe and exaggerate the “good” things government is doing. But of course most of the people making these speeches have a lot to be grateful for. They are, in many instances, undeserving beneficiaries of bounties dished out by the present regime. Such people have no transformative potential.
Listen to all these characters celebrate the “near miraculous” economic growth their policies have brought to the country. They will not acknowledge that this growth has been accompanied by rising unemployment, intensifying poverty and even more skewed income distribution. They pretend not to know that the increasing levels of crime have some connection with the stark social and economic contrasts resulting from their misgovernance. Twits!
The poor man rises to walk. He falls. I can hear the loud thud of his emaciated body hitting the sidewalk. He lies still, barely alive. One day he will lie still and die. A sad, lonely and miserable death. He will have no tombstone to mark his grave. A little mound of soil will mark the spot where his broken remains would have been dumped. That would be the only record of his tortured passage through this otherwise “rich” country. As Johnny Clegg of Juluka and Savuka fame says, “It’s a cruel, crazy, beautiful world”!
Economists talk of something they call the poverty datum line. Fancy talk maybe, but it describes certain levels of poverty below which it is unacceptable to keep any human being. The Constitution condemns cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
The silent blind man lives in the deepest levels of poverty; way below whatever poverty datum lines economists may theorize about. Government food rations are of no help. He has sunk deep. Vision 2016 cannot reach these levels. It is just talk; the expression of a longing. Sweet talk? Yes, sweet and empty. Where is your inarticulate Minister of Finance with his budget speech? Can he revive and restore this man? No hope. And then I feel some stirrings of rebellion and defiance rising up slowly around. I hear the whispered sibilance of discontent. I see and speak to the tormented silence of those, like me, who feel for the poor; who have Derrida’s “link of affinity, suffering and hope”!
