Andy Capp cartoons were all the rage when I was a kid in the 1960s. This layabout English drunk, whose life is the local pub, abuses everyone around him. He’s fed up with depressing news in the tabloids read by the working class. In one cartoon he resolves to treat his depression by giving up reading — but not drinking.
When I read the litany of incisive and poignant newspaper critiques of state institutions that are failing by the minute, I also sometimes want to give up reading and take to the bottle. When crusading CEOs such as Eskom's André de Ruyter and senior university administrators are targets of crazed hitmen, are we looking at the Haiti option? How will we dislodge the gangsters in government that public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan once railed against?
But then I read Sunday Times columnists. I compare their diverse and engaging writing styles, analyses and keen insights. These consummate writers lift my spirits. They reveal, prod and keep us sober. With embattled whistle-blowers, they tell us what is happening, who is responsible and ask why the hitmen and thieves are not in jail.
Ndumiso Ncgobo’s satire on the absurdities between premodernity (the past) and modernity (the industrialised present) is always instructive. Sue de Groot’s linguistic tutorial on historical wordplay exposes the contradictions of everyday meanings. There’s Peter Bruce, whose on-off love affair with Rama-this, Rama-that encrypts a forlorn hope of what could be. The ever-exasperated Barney Mthombothi, Lindiwe Mazibuko, Mike Siluma and William Gumede, among others, solutions-pushers all, should be the people governing us towards the “better future” the now-fading Freedom Charter promised. Like investigative journalists everywhere, these intellectuals confer slivers of hope, even in the darkest seas of social madness that constantly overwhelm South Africa.
How did we lose the plot so quickly?
S’thembiso Msomi last week cited Tshilidzi Marwala, whose pearl of wisdom was that “those who don’t read must not lead”. This University of Johannesburg vice-chancellor put his money where his books are by conducting regular reading groups on campus with anyone who wanted to participate. In less than a month, when he takes up his new post at the United Nations University in Tokyo, he is likely to continue reading with his students and staff.
Do our ruling politicians read? They do drink and eat, often at taxpayers' expense. So isolated and immune have they become that they don’t care what journalists or academics write about them anymore
Andy Capp is indicative. Drunk with power and blind to the potholed consequences of desperate wrangling over fast-diminishing and looted state resources, whole villages, towns, cities and provinces slide into ruin. The return is to subsistence economies, once annihilated by industrialised farming that is itself now threatened by power outages, attacks on trucks, overtaxed fuel, loss of rail and deteriorating roads to move produce to market. Food insecurity is the result.
Do our ruling politicians read? They do drink and eat, often at taxpayers' expense. So isolated and immune have they become that they don’t care what journalists or academics write about them any more. Thus, no need for the media tribunal or, worse, the apartheid-inspired information bill. They are bereft of reason, or at least logic the rest of us recognise and some of us teach.
They’ve even lost touch with their Soviet-era theorists, as cadres mismanage state-owned enterprises, yet bad-mouth the commercial sector. Not to mention the excessive salaries and perks on which tone-deaf politicians feast. The irony of ironies, arch-liberal ex-DA leader Tony Leon turned Leninism against the ruling party in his column last week. Lenin and Marx would be appalled at what Russia has become. Will errant cabinet ministers and their state-capture proxies dismiss Leon as a DA has-been, along with Lenin, Marx and Engels, whose optimism of a proletariat victory is as dim as ever?
Supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveals the poverty of the ANC’s once globally recognised humanist philosophy. A few dozen mega-wealthy oligarchs warehousing Putin’s obscene wealth, stolen from the state and ordinary Russians, perhaps provided the blueprint for what is happening here. I came to this realisation not after reading the harrowing books by investigative journalists writing popular sociologies, but from Bill Browder’s story, Red Notice, about how he became Putin’s number-one enemy.
The new elites — the handful of allies — simply privatised to themselves. In South Africa, the new political class calls it transformation, while vilifying the very capitalism whose firms and employees pay the taxes the corrupt misappropriate to feed at the trough. Yet regulated and responsible capitalism, as prone as it is to manipulation, is always predisposed to correction. The Russian form of self-correction involves the few oligarchs being systematically assassinated by the state or each other, sometimes including their families. Is this not reminiscent of the killing fields in South Africa that reach down to municipal levels, where contracted hitmen remove candidates hoping for election and privilege?
In South Africa, the number ones are whistle-blowers, honest policemen and journalists who file stories from safe, underground caverns. The Academy of Science of South Africa last week held a webinar entitled “The Threat to Leadership in South African Universities”. The professors discussed working in criminal conditions and the assassination and intimidation of academics and administrators trying to curtail corruption within their institutions. Where Lenin called for engineers, agronomists and scientists to fix and develop Russia, in South Africa they are targets of criminals and emigrate. Where are the #corruptionmustfall, #protectouruniveristystaff and #protectourfuture campaigns?
We’re all in this together. Let’s support our journalists, educationists, honest politicians, police officers, accountants and civil servants. Remember Lenin — “What is to be done?” The answer is in newspapers. Just ask Andy.
* Tomaselli is a distinguished professor at the University of Johannesburg and the author of 'Contemporary Campus Life: Transformation, Manic Managerialism and Academentia'. He writes in his personal capacity
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