It’s a great pity that the proposed national dialogue may be getting off on a controversial footing. It should be postponed to allow for proper preparations and to get everyone on board.
On Friday, four legacy foundations of prominent South Africans announced that they were pulling out of the first convention of the dialogue: a three-day event scheduled for next Friday. The reasons cited by the foundations — of FW de Klerk, Thabo Mbeki, Desmond and Leah Tutu, and Steve Biko — include concerns about resources, logistics, the state of readiness and, importantly, the role of the government in the dialogue.
On the latter, the four foundations believe the government’s role has effectively dwarfed that of citizens, who were supposed to lead the initiative to discuss SA’s common challenges and imagine a new SA three decades after the formation of a post-apartheid democratic order.
The idea of the dialogue came from the foundations, which subsequently sold it to government. After cobbling together the government of national unity (GNU), the ANC, the leading party in the GNU, reluctantly embraced the idea of the dialogue. Unsurprisingly, however, it took time before President Cyril Ramaphosa could announce the date of the first convention. He did so only a month ago, weeks after appointing 31 South Africans to champion the idea among the populace.
He also announced that the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), a marginalised statutory body for socioeconomic policymaking, would serve as the nucleus of the dialogue, which would cost more than R700m.
Over the weekend, he doubled down, announcing that the convention would proceed as planned. His reasons are that invitations have already gone out to hundreds of organisations, and, in any event, the convention is meant to be a call to action for South Africans to begin the dialogue in earnest.
This is problematic.
The first convention is important in inspiring confidence among South Africans that they are not being called into another talk shop by a government that enjoys low trust levels among its citizens. Also, as matters stand, the Eminent Persons Group has met only once or twice. They have hardly found their feet, and have yet to sell the dialogue idea to the public, which is their core mandate.
The government has spent more resources to date selling the G20 summit, due in November, than it has on the dialogue.
The GNU’s second-largest party, the DA, has threatened to boycott the dialogue after a spat over the sacking of Andrew Whitfield as the deputy minister for trade, industry & competition. Its demands that Ramaphosa fires several ministers have been partially met.
In reality, few sectors of society are ready for a genuine, honest and inclusive national dialogue. These are the churches and the foundations. With their shoestring budgets, the pair has engaged with the idea in a structured manner for much longer than other sectors.
These are not the only problems. Nedlac, which is poorly resourced, needs to assure the public that the funds transferred to it for the dialogue are ring-fenced so that they don’t end up in the wrong pockets.
The national dialogue was always going to be controversial. That is not a train smash. A robust dialogue, as happened with the Convention for a Democratic SA (Codesa) ahead of 1994 elections, is emotive, loud and unpredictable.
What is a train smash, though, is a dialogue that has a predetermined outcome and is a circus choreographed by the elites. Unlike Codesa, which was a dialogue of the elite, the national dialogue is a once-in-lifetime opportunity for a nation to imagine a new future by all, not a few.
A true national dialogue is still possible. A part of such a dialogue will entail a climbdown. A month’s delay of the convention would undoubtedly be an inconvenience and, to the naive, would be a loss of face for the president. His stature, however, would be enhanced by such a back-pedal.
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