We need a judgment call

In a world increasingly relying on data, SA politics still loves to do things old school. Even the Electoral Commission of South Africa loves the pen and paper.

I’m sure it has its reasons but as the electorate, it would be marvellous if we had an objective way of holding our leaders to account.

Sure, the Democratic Alliance puts out its annual scorecard and a couple of news outlets occasionally do the same. But these are inconsistent, subjective and generally not helpful because when things are bad, it’s easy to just cast criticism. And if you haven’t noticed, things have been pretty bad.

So as comrade Fikile Mbalula told us that we’d reverse load shedding by the end of the year and Paul Mashatile said it’s the government’s top priority, I found myself asking two questions: was it not the top priority before and aren’t those the same promises Cyril Ramaphosa made in 2015?

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It’s not like any of the other targets and promises to end load shedding were met, so forgive me for not feeling enthusiastic about this new set. Sadly, there’s even more reason to be dismissive of these additional promises – they have no reason to stick to them.

It’s not like we ever look back and realise we’ve heard the same state of the nation address five years running. It’s not like we didn’t know load shedding was a problem a decade ago.

You’d think that given one of the largest Cabinets in the world and the perpetual lip service to what a massive problem it is, something would have been done to fix it ages ago.

Either our government, for all its power, is too pathetic to fix the issue or by some miracle, there have been better things to do with its time like nuking the currency or competing in the World’s Highest Unemployment Rate Championships.

I wish we had some way to get this collective of getters-away-with-doing-nothing to walk the
talk or at least show how it has walked the talk.

And yes, I can hear the screaming of democracy and voting and blah-blah so before we hear that argument, understand that the reason we put people in parliament is because we don’t have the time to hold a referendum on every single issue, so we outsource that to elected representatives.

Nobody has the time to analyse the contributions, statements and effects of every minister and their deputies, let alone the rest of the members of the public official club.

Even if they did, there would be some argument about subjectivity and the issue would disintegrate into a battle of affiliation.

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However, if we got our leaders to put their promises somewhere public and give a criterion on how to judge them on it, the end of the election cycle would be more interesting and we could have a far better scorecard than that being given by the media or opposition.

Let the auditor-general handle it.

So next time Mbalula pipes up with a promise, let him volunteer his criteria, like in 2024 there will be half the number of days of load shedding as in 2023.

That’s an objective measurement and one that can easily be reduced to a pass or fail on a report card.

At the end of it, we can see which leaders passed or failed by their own standards or targets. Worryingly, what I believe is that such a system would show how many of our leaders would rather choose to do nothing.

At least then we will know.

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