The death of a nation is a slow demise that begins with the destruction of public institutions, writes Xolela Mangcu Share Article: I WALKED into one of Cape Town’s posh clothing shops the other day. I was immediately accosted by one of the young shop attendants. Usually this happens when I walk into similar shops at the Hyde Park Mall in Johannesburg, or on Fifth Avenue in New York, or Newbury Street in Boston, or Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. You know the shops I am talking about, where asking the price seems like the rudest thing on earth? It also does not help matters that I am often wearing sneakers, jeans and a cap. What was strange this particular time is that I was being accosted by a young black woman. Had she also been trained in the art of racial profiling, I wondered? And so, anticipating her question, I went on the offensive: Can I help you? I asked. Actually yes, sir, she replied. I see you’re wearing a UCT (University of Cape Town) sweater? Oh, there we go again, I thought, another question about whether I really go there or work there. I felt a tinge of embarrassment after hearing her out. The long and short of it was that the young woman wanted to see if I could help her get into UCT, if I was indeed a professor there. As one of the handful of black academics at UCT, I get a lot of these requests, even from people who should know better. Typically, a long lost friend will call in the middle of February: Eita Ngcu-boy, how are you broer? By this point, I know where the conversation is going. The daughter or the son did not apply, or the grades were not good enough, and is there anything I can do? I am sure that every time I say I cannot help, the guy — and they are always men — turns to his buddies or family and says: You see, people like Mangcu are tokens there, they can’t even get our kids in. They are just happy to get in and close the door behind them. So here is my collective plea: just make sure the kids apply on time, and work really hard to get in, for there is no one to help on the other side of the line. Anyway, my standard answer, which is the one I also gave to this young woman, is that, as an academic, I am not involved in undergraduate admissions. I advised the young lady to talk to the right people in the admissions office. I may have thought about her plight for the few days thereafter and then parked it in the subconscious. That encounter came rushing into my consciousness when I learned about Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s permanent appointment as the chief operations officer of the SABC. The contradiction between his case and that of the young woman could not be starker. Here was a young woman who had actually done her matric, was working hard to make ends meet and was asking for nothing more than an opportunity to improve herself. Her story is an allegory for that of millions of young black women and men in this country. The sociologist Emile Durkheim, and later Robert Merton, used the concept of anomie to describe the gap between personal aspirations and structural constraints that lead to despair, suicide, criminality and all kinds of social pathology. When half of the young people in your country see no way out through the educational and economic system, they grab whatever opportunities exist around them, with the government being the most lucrative and inviting and easy to get. All you need to do is to sign up for party membership, know a few people at the top of the ruling party and, voila, you are faced with the small matter of how to divvy up among your friends and comrades the 42% of government spending that is outsourced in SA. That’s right, research by the Public Affairs Research Institute shows more than R300bn is up for grabs. The comparative figure for the rich countries in the world is 29%. Also up for grabs are public institutions such as the SABC. Unlike the young woman in the clothing shop, a guy who allegedly faked his matric has just been appointed to a permanent job as the chief operations officer of the SABC. This is despite the advertisement stipulating a tertiary qualification. And despite Public Protector Thuli Madonsela declaring his misrepresentations as fraudulent. Where have you ever heard of something like that? What does it communicate to the millions of young people who put in an honest day’s work to finish their education? No, the story of the past 20 years shows that it is not the deserving who are rewarded in this country, it is the crooks. That is how nations die, through a slow death that starts with destroying institutions. • Mangcu is associate professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 06:53:18 +0000
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