Politics; not so stimulating
Tumie Modise | Monday October 26, 2015 15:12
It’s a given that politicians can run off with your head, even mess up your common sense if you are naive. Now the thing with our politicians is that when they are voted into office, the only prerequisite seems to be that they should be alive at election time, everything else is secondary.
Nobody cares about whether you possess seven degrees like our uncle up North, nobody even cares that you scaled the primary school fence many years ago at tea break.
If you want to stand for office, you stand; it’s as simple as that and it is called democracy. Democracy is good, but on the flipside, democracy often means that we now find ourselves under the influence of bad leaders and leadership.
Asked about major international militant groups at a recent US presidential candidate debate recently, Republican candidate Donald Trump sent his supporters scurrying for cover when he admitted he was clueless.
Like I mentioned, a swarm of bees in the form of a stimulus package was unleashed about a week ago. Like they had already had their secret dose of this stimulus, politicians put on their political Sunday best and went for the kill! Politics is the only profession where one does not need a degree in political science or some other related degree in order to qualify; one only needs a mouth, a loud one being an added advantage! True to form, local politicians immediately took to radios, newspapers, even social media.
Battle lines were drawn; the ruling party politicians were ‘defending’ and their opponents had the easy task of ‘attacking’. Silly if you ask me.
The problem with our current state of politics is not so much that our politicians have new ideas, but that they are dangerously simplistic. Someone outside our borders once remarked that “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
The idea may be building a wall on our border with Zimbabwe; it might be building more dams, it might be striking a better deal with one of these countries with rich oil deposits.
They are simple issues, well, that is until these mainstream politicians respond to them.
The not-so bright politicians notwithstanding, today’s society is incredibly complex; it is safe to say that if there were simple answers to policy problems (like the stimulus packages), they would have been found and applied before. When governments think about raising taxes, for example, they have to think about the costs of collection, the impact on economic activity, and the risk that taxpayers will move elsewhere.
When they think about cutting spending, they face the problem that a lot of spending is automatic (pensions, unemployment benefits) as well as the impact on the economy.
The list is just endless but even for a layman like me, such things make perfect sense.
As the heated debates on the stimulus package continued last week, one local radio station summoned two young, bright and vibrant politicians to their studios to debate the issue. By some stroke of luck, both are trained Economists, and both are opposition leaders.
What transpired is best left to other Economist to explain. Once more, politics prevailed over facts; they even prevailed over common sense in some instances. That’s just the way it is.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that journalists are as guilty of this as anyone.
Journalists find it is easy to hold others to a higher standard, in this country they seem to have in their possession, the golden yardstick, the one they use to ‘measure’ up good and bad politicians. This lot also treats politics as a game in which one side is winning or losing, in which disagreements within parties are “splits” and “divisions”.
What they miss, and they are in the majority, is that all parties are but coalitions; one would have to be an automaton to agree with.
As we all look forward to the next session of parliament where hopefully the package will be laid out, even debated, one can only buy a ring seat at the August house.
This is definitely going to be bigger than the current tsunami that is the Sydney Pilane membership issue at the BMD.
Surely, stimulating an economy has to be more complex an issue than a membership issue, but that is just me and my line of thinking.