Story audio is generated using AI
When a country is at war, production and supply chain systems get reoriented to prevail against the enemy forces.
The young and strong may be conscripted and taken to the frontlines to fend-off invading troops.
Likewise, we would be constantly looking for ways to rope in many of our countrymen and women to help us gain victory, if SA was at war.
We would ask what those in various professions could offer to the country to harness their capabilities towards winning.
Well, we are at war, in fact.
More about that later. Let me share what occasioned these thoughts recently.
I was preparing to speak at an SA Navy World Hydrography Day event on June 19 at one of our country’s maritime schools.
For my inspiration, I went back to a crucial part of my training as a student more than 22 years ago.
It was in 2004 when I got introduced to a journalism & media studies course titled “Journalism, Development and Democracy”.
A crucial part of the module was the idea of communication for development.
It called on us as future journalists to go beyond the role of the fourth estate, the watchdog role.
The media needed to use their platforms to empower citizens for their own development.
It was an idea that focused on the meaning of what we did for the greater objective of development in a country that was democratising at the time.
An example of this would be publishing information about benefits from development programmes, along with guidelines for individuals and communities to tap into them.
It would be the kind of information that helped a farmer to farm better, a start-up to know how to access markets, and a municipality to gain better understanding of application procedures for National Treasury grants.
It’s journalism that goes beyond scandal.
It is the “so what” of what we do as professionals.
It is what leadership guru John C Maxwell calls transitioning from success to significance.
Or what entrepreneur and man of the cloth Jerome Liberty calls the ultimate value of qualifications, that is, the tangible benefits for a person and their community rather than merely hanging certificates on a wall in the office.
That is the concept. Now back to the war thesis.
Many people have pointed to the fact that the murder rate in our country is extremely high, resembling and, sometimes, outmatching those in warzones.
The latest data from police crime statistics shows an average of 58 killings a day in the country, multiple times higher than the global average.
By that standard alone, we are a country at war with itself.
It was from another angle that I thought we should consider ourselves at war, though.
It was because of poverty and its devastating effects.
War is truly devastating.
It disrupts patterns of the production and distribution of goods and services in society.
And, above all, it strikes the kind of awe that may paralyse the faint-hearted or trigger deplorable behaviour such as cannibalism.
AmaXhosa put it correctly: indlala inamanyala — poverty has caused (correctly interpreted as “causes”) obscenity.
The coldblooded killings for tenders, insurance policies and gruesome acts of violence in pursuit of money all point to amanyala endlala.
The young boys who get hired as hitmen consider their acts as a trade.
Siphush’ ispan, as one inkabi (assassin) put it in an SABC documentary, referring to killing a person as a “job”.
But poverty itself has devastating consequences in our society, not just amanyala, which result from people who commit atrocious acts in pursuit of dough.
When taking all the poverty lines into account, about two-thirds of the population face varying degrees of poverty.
That is more than 40-million people who live a precarious life, facing devastating socioeconomic consequences.
Granted, there have been notable declines across the three expenditure-centric approaches to measuring poverty since 2006, according to StatsSA.
This is worth celebrating, but we should be gravely concerned and take to the battlefront if we are to truly respond to the challenge of our time.
So, my challenge to the Navy personnel and the few civilians in the room was simple.
How would we reorient our approaches to the professional roles we play if we truly recognised poverty as a war on our society?
Would we not redirect most, if not all, of our resources towards eliminating the devastating advance of this enemy?
The title of the talk was “Hydrography for development: A political economy perspective”.
The idea was to show, as the Japanese do in their Gung Ho principle, that there can be broader meanings to what we do and bring in more enthusiasm for the roles we play, no matter how seemingly insignificant.
When we view our seemingly mundane tasks through complexity systems and chaos theory, underscored by the idea of the relatedness of all phenomena in the universe, we begin to see the potential for bigger effects on the wider system.
The person who woke up and visited the Wuhan meat market, or the lab worker whose negligence might have caused the slip of the virus into the wider Wuhan populace, might have only been thinking about their daily activities at the time.
They did not know that those activities on that specific day would have disproportionate consequences on the wider environment.
Therefore, we all need to fuel urgency in what we do, and we need a government that can declare poverty as war and socioeconomic disaster so that we treat it with all the necessary urgency and priority it deserves.
Acting under a war or disaster regime will be different.
We do not do things the same way in war due to the consequences of inaction and inertia in every passing moment.
Just because the elite, in their varying degrees, do not experience the devastating consequences of poverty on a daily basis does not mean that it is not, in fact, having gruesome consequences.
What will it take to wake us up?
- Dr Ongama Mtimka is the acting director of the Raymond Mhlaba Centre for Governance and Leadership at Nelson Mandela University. He writes in his personal capacity