Nkosana Sibuyi

Posted by Nkosana Sibuyi: 19 June 2011

Professor Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele’s final and eponymous annual address on 9 March 1998 at the University of the North around 12h23 invoked in one the appreciation that we are a people of a day after tomorrow-and that we must “develop the special capacity to make dreams reachable”. In his prelude for this address, Professor Ndebele recalled one of the major events which took place and induced most of the people who were aware of it, “a profound state of contemplation. It was an event that made us so conscious of time and human history. It boggles the imagination to ask: what will the Earth look like 2400 years from now, when the Hale-Bopp comet is estimated to pass once more on its exorable journey? What will South Africa be like then? Will the University of the North still be there?”

Prof Ndebele continued: “these questions are not academic. They speak to yet another set of questions: what is the purpose of human society and of institutions in society? These may be difficult questions to answer, but one thing seems to run through all human societies: the necessity to survive. Those societies which master the skills of survival thrive: those which don’t, perish.”

Having had the privilege and distinct honour to attend this final annual address, one began to internalise the essence of scenario planning for the country in terms of planning, policy permutations and plausible paths to the future. Since scenarios are not predictions, it became crucial for one to understand a range of possible futures based on the imaginary key driving forces to help imagine and manage the possible future that may arise. It dawned on one that the sustenance of constitutional democracy, the principal drivers of change, associated risks facing the country and how they might play out in the future remains dialectical and phenomenological.

It is instructive to note the scenario team met at The Mount Fleur conference outside Cape Town and decided on four scenarios as a tool of analysis and paths to the future. This became known as The Mount Fleur Scenarios conceptualised in 1992 comprising of Lame Duck, Icarus, Ostrich and Flight of the Flamingo. Broadly, there was an appreciation that the Flight of the Flamingo scenario outlined a feasible and desirable outcome for the future.

Married to the above, the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG), in its book, Making Democracy Work: A Framework for macro-economic Policy in South Africa published in 1993 noted that the state should provide leadership and coordination for widely based economic development and must intervene directly in key areas to facilitate this development. The machinery of Government, in addition to being democratic, with strong mechanisms of accountability and transparency, must serve the purposes of a developmental state.

In the current contemporary context, the South African government released the diagnostic overview undertaking a detailed analysis of the challenges, limits and achievements of constitutional democracy since ushering of democracy. The report determinedly identifies nine key challenges the country faces in the eradication of poverty and underdevelopment from which the country is padlocked to delays in remaking a better South Africa. The Vision 2030 shall be a statement of commitment to propel the country onto a sustainable growth and developmental trajectory, elements of which have been outlined in the diagnostic report. The Vision will undoubtedly transform the country into a well and garden of humanity.

It is perhaps fitting that a toilet has emerged, literally and figuratively, as an essential force that cannot be ignored, marginalised and side-lined. Recognising the objective reality that change is dynamic one will nevertheless acknowledge the phenomenology and folklore of social cohesion and values. On the occasion of the election campaign in preparation for 18 May 2011 election day, toilets inserted themselves as an apposite metaphor for the national political agenda. Commodes define humankind’s dignity, integrity and resilience.

In this connection, toilets have been able to determine the content, nature, pitch, tune of the national discourse. Whichever way it is looked at and deconstructed, lavatories defined the appropriateness and relevance of a story to be told. In a sense, toilets walked on the wire and communicated clear messages refusing to be taken for granted. They shaped a moment of reflection, national conversation and the search for solutions to the country’s complex challenges. Without any doubt, toilets created a possibility for a nation in dialogue. It was and remains a necessary patriotic conversation.

Further, toilets have helped to problematize the objective and subjective conditions. The importance of lavatories is not merely cosmetic. Rivers and fields were and are still used when people are pressed to relieve themselves. Without any compunction, those who do not enjoy the privilege of owning a toilet use the forest or rivers during the day. At night and the corners of their privacy, predominantly in the rural hinterland, they dig up holes in the ground to dispose of human waste. In other instances unimaginable in some rural areas, they dig up holes in the rivers sand to create a possibility to relieve themselves of the human waste. These are the same rivers that are used to draw water for human consumption. Water is life. Water is priceless. Water is precious. The reality that people use rivers to relieve themselves of the human waste expose(d) communities to risks, vulnerabilities and intractable challenges. It was conventional. It was and still is not unusual to do that.

One recalls the myths and mythology that were pelted around relieving oneself in the vicinity of a fellow herdsman in the veld. First, it was impressed upon most of us (in a form of an allegation) that to relieve oneself next to a fellow herd man, nature would ensure that one mother’s breasts will be gradually removed. Second, it was also alleged that in the process of relieving oneself, it is impermissible to touch down as it shall automatically summon one’s fellow friend to relieve himself too. This represented the useful nature of toilets, their contemporary relevance and meaning. Humankind cannot exist and enjoy a better life without the utility of a lavatory.

Elections are a high-octane journey towards irrevocable change. Latrines recognised that there is power in marginality. Toilets accepted that there is virtue in stillness. They are also keenly alive to the objective reality that they cannot be taken for granted. Two assumptions suggest themselves. First, the open loos at different municipalities including those at Makhaza Township at the Western Cape and Rammulotsi township, near Viljoenskroon, in the Free State Province created a platform for ordinary people to raise their frustrations and concerns around the paucity of service delivery. Second, it represents a delay in service delivery to improve the quality of lives of the people whose wellbeing ought to have been changed immediately after the 2006 local government elections. It continues to escape the nation’s mind as to why it became more urgent in 2011 rather than after the 2006 local government elections to construct toilets.

An optic illustration is that what appears to be the content and form of the same and the other may be misleading. The crude example of the toilets, ipso facto, illustrates the centrality of governance biased against the people, markedly speaking to the poverty of the country’s socio-political predicament. Peter Berger’s twenty-five theses inherent in the book, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change, captures the humanist argument by fusing the ethics and science to grapple with the perilous challenges besetting human development.

However, instead of discussing all twenty-five theses as he presents, this reflection on the toilets, their relevance and meaning will examine only three of them, amongst which Berger italicised as forming the core of his argument. They are organised into a story are as follows:

(i) “Policies for social change are typically made by cliques of politicians and intellectuals with claims to superior insights. These claims are typically spurious”. Berger’s view above recognises that no individual has the Solomonic wisdom and Herculean strength to resolve the complex challenges facing humankind in a rapidly changing polity. It could be argued and should be clear to everyone that for society to maximise its potential, the mantra should be designed in such a manner that people must become active participants in the process of social change and transformation. To a remarkable degree, change cannot and must not be the preserve of the privileged few who will model society’s programme in a manner that will suit their acutely myopic desires and interests.

(ii) “Those who are the objects of policy should have the opportunity to participate not only in specific decisions but in the definitions of the situation on which these decisions are based. This may be called cognitive participation”. Clearly and arguably, this view is aligned to Niccolo Machiavelli’s paradigm (The Prince) on statecraft when he contends that a man who becomes a prince through the help of the people gain understanding and appreciation of his rule and he “has no one or very few not prepared to take orders.”

(iii)“We need a new method to deal with questions of political ethics and social change (including those of development policy). This will require bringing together two attitudes that are usually separate-the attitudes of “hard nosed analysis” and of the utopian imagination”.

What Berger’s book is finally all about is just this: the approach to human development and improvement must be accompanied by dialectical change as well as continuity. This recognises the objective reality that human development is shaped by history and current circumstances. This is not looking backwards at the expense of foresight. It limns an appreciation that development is about people.

Berger’s reflections go into the kernel of modernity, development, ideology, policies and ethics in the evolution of the society and the world. Berger’s approach to development is grounded in the belief that people’s way of constructing a meaningful world has to be respected as way of constructing reality. He believes that this is the only route to a humane approach to development policy.

The humane approach to development policy and the humanistic theory take a holistic approach, one that views the human condition in its totality and each person as more than a collection of physical, social and psychological components as a basis for sustainable development. Plato’s advice is most edifying and apposite here: “when the right jobs are attempted by the wrong people, democracy is bound to flounder.”

The significance of the toilet and its broader ontology of the social reality of South Africa bear a living testimony to the construction of a humane society. This may sound oxymorous owing to the subjective and objective reality as appositely described in Cass Sunstein’s book, Why Society Needs Dissent: “Well-functioning societies take steps to discourage conformity and to promote dissent. They do this partly to protect the rights of dissenters, but mostly to protect the interests of their own”.

Professor Ndebele, Sunstein, Berger, Machiavelli, The Mount Fleur Scenarios, The Diagnostic Overview and the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG teaches humankind that 2400 years from now, South Africa can and must master the art and science of shaping or constructing a living legacy. History will not absolve the current generation owing to her failure to respect the legitimacy, integrity and credibility of toilets in human development, philosophy and civilisation.