Bernard Spong commented, via Facebook: “Didn’t I hear some bigwig of government say that all Municipal Councillors are to hold local meetings every month to keep in touch with their constituents? That provides a D2 platform doesn’t it?”

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Tsk, where da plucky rebels gone?

Bernard, how I appreciate your engaging on this. In return I advise D2’s massed readership that Bernard Spong has recently produced a mightily readable book, Sticking Around, on the life, travails and insights, often searing, of a Brit priest being bitten by South Africa and its issues. (He is also a brief hero in my Radical Middle, at a moment when all I could see was Debtor’s Prison beckoning me, receptionist Desmond M Tutu).

In preparation for when you can clear your head of all this fame, Bernard, here is my take on the issue you raise. Be aware that I address, with a heavy-duty trowel, every seed of enquiry that anyone plants. It’s not that I am smitten by a last-word syndrome. It is that to me the general direction of D2 is the obvious way to go; a downside-free political proposal, for nearly everyone. (Though damaging the media’s supply of corpses, stone-throwers, charging police, wailing mothers and plucky pro-democracy rebels rushing hither and thither in bakkies with rocket-launchers.) I’m mystified that I can’t get it across, so I grab each echo, like yours, that lets me explore flesh on the bones. (Oops, can I have a prize for mangled metaphor?)

We rulers with our sceptres

Bernard’s comment has three parts – the bigwig in government, councillors having to hold monthly meetings, a platform for D2. My reply begins at square one, that point at which we truly, thoroughly, take our headspace into the notion that the people rule. I emphasise this because it’s assumed there is some trick or hocus in what I’m saying. Nope. If you start with nothing but the thought that, yes, it’s quite correct that we the people should really rule, the rest slots into place. I have no monopoly on doing the slotting.  You can slot for yourself. Just start from that basis: if we the people are the rulers, howcome everything we’re allowed to do depends on lawyers interpreting a document composed by a hallful of dignitaries in an era more primitive than our own?

My understanding from that basis is that a lot of stuff that is natural now will look barmy in D2, and vice versa. Look at that bigwig in government. Bernard now, in common with almost anyone, takes it as natural that when the bigwig says: “councillors, you’ve all gotta hold monthly meetings”, the councillors spring to attention, salute and say “Ja Baas”.  In D2, the bigwig in government won’t even think of telling the councillors how to conduct their affairs, and if he did the only salute he would receive is the one now being irreverently called the Zuma Salute in honour of our president’s middle-fingered way of straightening his glasses during speeches.

As I see it D2 will have only a slender shadow of the current idea that government is everybody’s boss and government’s people are to be bowed to and scraped to. National government being the biggest of the many governments around there will doubtless be an element of primus inter pares, first among equals, but we’ll shed the current sense of the cabinet as overlords and the president as a 5-year elected dictator whose every sneeze is to be scrutinised for hidden meaning. It’ll be common for voters to attach as much or more esteem to a mayor or a provincial leader as to a minister or president , as a natural consequence of the fact that local or regional issues can routinely be bigger in people’s minds than national ones. Councillors will be in no doubt who their bosses are – the people who vote for them and can recall them. That too flows naturally from our premise: that power is exercised at the level that interested parties wish it to be exercised. By the same token, the same natural flow means a reduced notion of politics as climbing a hill, a politician “graduating upward” from town councillor to provincial councillor, from province to parliament.  Local or regional leaders may unremarkably cease to recognise “upward” at all.

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Secondly, implicit in Bernard’s “monthly meeting” is the idea that this is a good thing to have, and even better to be made compulsory. Again, Bernard is speaking for many, many people in today’s D1 society, frantic for some sign of accountability, transparency, contact. Again, this is a place where (by my interpretation of what has to flow from the real rule of the people) D2’s perspectives will be a long way from today’s. If you’re going to make my councillor hold monthly meetings, is the next step that you are going to make me attend these monthly meetings? If so, two questions arise: (1) who the hell are you to tell me how to exercise my bit of rule? It’s mine. (2) Why on earth would you want to? My councillor is under control, automatic control, built in to the system. If enough of her electorate – including the large proportion who would never thinking of going to a political meeting – want her to do things differently … well, either she obliges or she’s out of office. We may want our councillor to hold weekly meetings, or quarterly meetings. We may want him to stop holding meetings. We may want him to consult us on everything, we may want him to stay right out of our hair and just do it, until we say stop. It’s our business, we rule.

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Semi-last – a platform for D2. I hate to be boring here. A great majority of D2’s aficionados want some kind of pilot study. I myself can’t see it. It’s not a question of whether small is beautiful, it’s about a web oif infinite mobility among elected leadership. To me it has to stand or fall on its logic (until it gets implemented somewhere as a whole). But although I’ve heard a lifetime’s worth of “no, impossible”, I’m yet to hear someone tell me where the logic is wrong.

Last: while thanking Bernard again for the platform he has given me, I put in writing a feature that has grown recently on me. We tend to think of our leaders as our rulers. Ask an American who rules America, you quite likely get the answer “Obama” or “Congress”. Ask a South African and you’ll almost certainly get “Zuma” or “the ANC” (spot the difference, incidentally). Either way, what I suggest here is that we will grow to see “leaders” and “rulers” as quite separate things. D2 liberates a lot of leadership to do a lot of leading. But we the people are the rulers, with our pencil as our sceptre.

And now I am grossly overdue for breakfast. Khotso! Sterkte!