The Arrogance of Power

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Xolela Mangcu. The Arrogance of Power

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XOLELA MANGCU

THE ARROGANCE OF POWER

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I am therefore heartened by the fact that Mbeki will be bring­ing issues of nation-building and linguistic pluralism to the cen­tre of his governance. I was also heartened to hear the president say that ‘no one should feel that sense of alienation which drives peo­ple into peripheral existence’. As the American political theorist Michael Walzer has written: ‘When minorities are free to celebrate their histories, remember their dead, and shape in part the edu­cation of their children, they are more likely to be harmless than when they are unfree.’

As South Africans, we have done a great job with developing procedural democracy – elections, constitutions, courts, and so on. What we need now is to fill these structures with content. What Mbeki can help us do is to build a more substantive democ­racy, with clearly identifiable public values. Moving from vision to policy, Mbeki outlined in his speech a laundry list of policy initiatives that make broad generalists such as myself yawn and, like some members of parliament, drop off to sleep. Here too Mbeki demonstrated a level of comfort with policy that most heads of state do not have. The only other president I can think of with such a grasp of public policy is America’s Bill Clinton.

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