Thabo Mbeki says it’ll be better for us than a double dose of garlic and beetroot.
Cyril Ramaphosa wants it more than a new couch and housekeeping staff that keep their mouths shut.
But as the national dialogue rapidly degenerates into a factional diatribe, many South Africans can be forgiven for having doubts.
For some, the reported spat between Mbeki and Ramaphosa over who gets to lead the dialogue is threatening to derail something historic and vital.
Writing in the Sunday Times, former DA leader Lindiwe Mazibuko reminded us of the ground-breaking and era-defining national consultations that took place in the mid-1990s as part of the birth of our constitution, and I think many of us can agree with her that something equally momentous is needed now to break us out of our funk.
After all, when your hiking group has realised it’s lost and seems to be blundering ever closer to a cliff-edge, everyone knows you need to stop, have a sit-down and try to figure out a plan.
Hoggers
What I don’t understand though, is why you’d allow the sit-down to be run by the people who’ve been hogging the compass and the map and who, when you asked them why they kept turning the map upside down and murmuring “oh, wait…”, called you a counter-revolutionary or a racist.
Then again, the whole thing is feeling slightly detached from reality, not least in the way we keep being told that this is our idea, as in the Sunday Times’ editorial which insisted that the national dialogue as outlined by Mbeki “became a widely accepted way of affording South Africans a chance to confront the country’s deepening crisis free of political interference”.
Now, I’ve admitted in this column before that I don’t always stay on top of things and it’s very possible we’ve had a whole consultative process and I just snoozed through the referendum in which we all voted for it, but honestly, all I can remember is being told that it was going to happen and then being told that you and I would be paying at least half a billion for it.
But neither of them understands that before it can start South Africans first need to hear just two words, spoken honestly and with humility: mea culpa.
Still, credit where it’s due: the dialogue as proposed by Mbeki and Ramaphosa clearly isn’t just an attempt to kick the can down the road. Instead, there seems to be a genuine desire to move past outdated road- and can-based paradigms by imagining a new generation of cans, far more forgiving on pointy designer shoes, as well as a new sort of road, which slopes away endlessly into the distance so that the can rolls and rolls and rolls, and you only have to have another one of these fake resets in 60 years rather than 30.
But back to reality, where the looming fiasco of the national dialogue presents us with two intractable, mutually exclusive truths.
The first is that we urgently need a sit-down: we can’t go on like this. The second is that the only people who can lead a second Codesa, or at least be leading partners in it, have betrayed our trust so completely for so long that no sensible person can believe anything they propose.
For Mbeki and Ramaphosa, a national dialogue will be a talking cure, a process in which thousands and thousands of words slowly form a new picture. But neither of them understands that before it can start South Africans first need to hear just two words, spoken honestly and with humility: mea culpa.
Until our leaders admit that they can’t be trusted with the map and the compass, it’s not a dialogue. It’s a denial.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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