Vince Musewe certainly is pointing up the same avenue as D2. The main difference is that he is saying there should be, there ought to be, it's be nice if there could be, a mechanism for bringing the voice of the people to audibility. I'm saying there is a mechanism, it's an easy one, and when the Vinces of the world latch on to it, it will rapidly become a reality.
(I was tempted to say "unstoppable reality", but that would be interestingly misleading. It implies that someone would try to stop it. It'll be unstopped because no segment will fear it.)
I dispute Vince on two counts. One is we-poor-blacks. He takes the line "they'll always think we're thick, let's get on with things regardless", which I'd say is a big up on the norm ("oh oh oh, how dreadful that they think we're thick") but is still a bit paranoid. I don't think it's surprising that the past was full of superiority and inferiority complexes. I do think those things are vanishing now. I was born into a time when almost anyone, of any colour, took it for granted that the pale crowd were a higher breed. We took a while graduating to "ah, but except for the exceptions". Then we took a longer while to stop thinking "exception"; to accept bright ous as bright and dof ous as dof, and delink them from race or group. It may be that group generalisations are in for a long innings (cf Europe -- "the British can't cook", "the Swedes are dour", "the Portuguese are disorganised"...) but I see these becoming lightweight, slightly off-taste, jokes, as long as you let people be. How sad that our society won't let people be; that government policy causes one race to be abnormally pushed into failure. I battled for years, at each new collapse or the next missing R100million, to overcome the response "omigod, see, blacks can't do it". Now, thankfully, when I meet some embittered fallen ex-CEO I feel only the human tragedy: another person who could have been content halfway or two-thirds up the ladder ruined by being catapulted to the top.
(Btw, I thank my dad for a great start. I was 10 or 12 when his friend Derek Scorer was appointed MD of his company, AE&CI, and I was upset: Derek was boss and my dad was a plain middle manager, how could this be? He sat me down and told me: he trusted himself doing what he did do, he enjoyed his day, he slept well; if he was landed with Derek's job he'd do none of the above; I was better off with a happy dad than with a long car. Brilliant, hey?)
My bigger row with Vince is his worry about African voters not knowing enough. I had that worry once, but was cured at an English fairground shortly before an election. I learned it isn't about what you know; it's about the means made available for expressing. If voters roll up once every 5 years to vote their identity as represented by a dark Zuma or a pale Zille, a Luo Odinga or a Kikuyu Kibaki, you get the vrottest level of democracy. Next step up is where your city vote or your province vote actually matters to you (which applies to the top third of so of the 199 self-proclaimed democracies). D2 takes that principle further, a long way further. It lets Sophie Mthethwa at the mealie stand [my image of Ms Average, Vince] actually know -- personally; name, face, meet at the bus-stop -- a handful of leadership figures. Sophie acquires a little local pin-point of leadership, with a toehold on the pyramid of power. This pin-point is installed not by the strong grabbing seats for themselves and not by the loud anointing leaders by acclaim. It is installed by an electoral commission conducting a free and secret ballot within Sophie's most local community, just as it conducts elections in bigger communities, up to the national community.
For Sophie on this basis to be a responsible voter requires one single thing. It requires that she can achieve, through her vote, something that matters to her. The key is that the local council has powers that can make a difference to her life. If it has that, its leadership will grow on her. She will vote for someone she trusts, someone she believes knows more than her. She will to some extent take guidance from this someone, such as for instance in regard to which candidates in a regional or national election will best help to achieve Sophie's aims. And when Sophie feels that these aims are no longer served by Councillor A, or that Councillor A's policies are putting tension or expense into her life, she will switch to Councillor B. All the way through this process, it is possible that each individual Sophie to be crazy, belligerent, unhinged in any of million ways; it is certain that the overwhelming mass of Sophies are going to vote for what they believe will bring progress into their lives peacefully and inexpensively. They will do that whether or not they can read, write, or have ever heard of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Vince need never again worry that African electorates let democracy down.
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