Community voices vital to National Dialogue

Communities do not wait for their fate to determine their lives

- NKOSIKHULULE NYEMBEZI

WHENEVER I need to leave a boring gathering, I ask my media officer to post my apologies on social media.

And so it was that the collective of legacy foundations media officers informed social media users midmorning on August 8 that they had ditched the National Dialogue scheduled for August 15 “not out of apathy or disengagement’, but because of their commitment “to the belief that all aspects of the National Dialogue must be credible, principled, and anchored in public trust”.

This development comes after barely five weeks of former president Thabo Mbeki’s drabness in his claim to be the originator of the dialogue and his chastisement of DA leader John Steenhuisen for walking away from the process because of his party’s profound misgivings.

The gathering is trying to carry on without Mbeki, one of its central characters - a bit like my childhood football teams did after the child who owns the ball abruptly left the match. It is hard when you have spent days of buildup reading that such a gathering in the age of second-term Ramaphosa is effectively another ANC show.

Although he has a distinctive character as a head of state, he is not the centre of gravity as not everything revolves around him. Pick your physics metaphor and try to imagine a government-driven dialogue where community voices show up as tokens.

Many outside the ANC and government have long expressed detachment from the formal dialogue organised in the government-invited space, noting that the nation is already engaged in an informal national dialogue conducted in community-invented spaces.

The informal dialogue evolves along the borders of social struggles, incorporating those too weak to defend themselves, rejecting those who become too conflictive, and propelling those with stamina and resources into surrogate partnership.