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Countrymen, lend me your ears

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In response to Ferial Haffajee’s distracting and deeply problematic question – which is also the title of her recently published book What If There Were No Whites In South Africa? – writer and analyst Tlotlang Osiame Molefe asked: “What if we listened to each other in South Africa?”

This, for me, presents a critical question if we are to begin to move towards an intersectional solution to this country’s challenges.

Molefe’s question is far more useful than many of the questions we are currently obsessed with, given that the public discourse (particularly that of the middle class, as seen in the pages of this newspaper, for instance) seems less interested in finding a solution and more interested in being right.

Those who are pro-capitalism will not listen to how inequality is South Africa’s biggest challenge, because that means they would need to make concessions about the shortcomings of their preferred system, which, while having delivered some benefits, has impoverished and disenfranchised millions.

Those pro-socialism (not too dissimilar to their capitalist counterparts) refuse to discuss the shortcomings of a system that has failed elsewhere.

But the real loss is the lost opportunity to find a workable solution that may involve both socioeconomic stances for addressing our urgent problems, simply because we refuse to listen, and remain stubbornly attached to our theories.

The time for being precious is over; it has been for a while. Those who still harp on about the rainbow nation have become irrelevant.

We need to articulate a South Africa beyond fake unity, one that works for everyone rather than those lucky few who, for too long, have been far removed from the dire reality of millions of their fellow citizens. It does not seem to matter to them what South Africa was, and still is, like for people whose lives they know little or nothing about.

We are not being asked to confirm that poverty must be eradicated, or that tertiary education remains inaccessible to the majority.

Rather, we need to listen, especially those of us trying to help or do good. Perhaps those are the very people who need to listen most.

Participants in the #ZumaMustFall marches seem to believe that doing “good” absolves them from listening to criticism, but that’s what resulted in these gatherings being so problematic.

After a year of talking over South Africans who are trying to explain what living here means to them, one hopes that 2016 becomes the year that the “do-gooders” put into practice what is so often preached.

Follow me on Twitter @GugsM

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