What those who set the national agenda ignore can be as important as the issues that get them talking. Last Friday Durban was startled by a blast at its Engen oil refinery, the second-biggest in the country. The fire caused by the explosion did not take anyone’s life but seven people were hospitalised. The plant was shut down temporarily, the company is investigating and the department of mineral resources & energy says it “will urgently conduct an assessment of petroleum products supply”.
But the national debate’s reaction has been ... silence; the blast has triggered no response at all. At first glance this seems fair. There were no fatalities, action has been taken and an investigation has begun. It may seem less fair if we consider this: had the blast happened close to an area where the politicians, journalists and others who shape the debate live, rather than in Merebank, a low-income area of Durban, would the debate have been this relaxed? Or would it be alarmed that another blast might do far more damage to people, and warn that action is needed now before it is too late?
Would we not be hearing that environmental activists have been warning for years that the refinery is a health hazard (which they have done)? Of course, these questions are asked only to make a point. The people who shape the debate tend to live in suburbs whose residents are always powerful enough to ensure facilities such as refineries are never built near them.
And, if the incident had happened at a government facility, would the debate have been happy with assurances that investigations had begun? Would it not have been demanding answers here and now? And would it not be pressuring the investigators to say when they will tell us what went wrong?
The lack of interest confirms one of the realities of our public debate. What matters to it is what worries the connected, not the concerns of people living in areas near refineries. Also, private power holders are not held to account in the same way as those in government, even when what they do can affect not only the wellbeing of many people where they operate but the fuel supply that keeps the economy going.
So deep-rooted are these biases that they sometimes let the government off the hook too. If the refinery is a problem for public health and energy supply, this may not only be because of what the owning company does and the government does not do: it has entirely ignored the campaigners’ warnings.
This is not an isolated example. Many threats to public wellbeing, including the corruption that so often exercises the debate, are not a product only of what government does or of what private interests do — they stem from what they both do.
The tired debate about whether we should blame the public or private sector for these problems misses the point that they are often a product of what both have done (or not done), sometimes in collusion with each other.
The debate is not set up for this. It is used to the well-trodden furrows in which the cliché “speaking truth to power” is about shouting at government, not holding to account all those who shape the lives of all us for good or ill. Which is surely why the “orange jumpsuit” brigade is far less vocal about Steinhoff than about politicians and government officials.
Although the immediate losers are the excluded, whose problems are of no interest to the debate, this blindness ensures that many threats to the health — physical, social and economic — of all of us go unnoticed because they would take the debate into areas to which it does not want to go.
• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
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