Connecting national dots

A few days ago I listened to a discussion on SAFM dealing with nation building. The two political analysts invited to unpack this subject had the task of answering the question of who exactly is responsible for “nation building”.

Before expressing a view in relation to this question you must bear in mind that South Africa is a highly diverse country and diversity tends to polarise rather than unify.

The idea of “unity in diversity” has been expressed on many platforms but how do we actually move it from rhetoric to reality? How do we make a nation with 11 official languages and many distinct ethnic groups into a cohesive whole?

I suggest that if we had less diversity we would arrive more quickly at the goal. In their book, The South African Dream, co-authors John Hunt and Reg Lescaris show that the tension between ethnocentrism and patriotism is less likely to occur in countries with less ethnic diversity than those with more.

They state: “Apparently, ethnic interest groups can delay the implementation of macro-economic strategies that seem to jeopardise their privileges. Stupid policy environments, corruption and other issues hobbled African progress, but ethnic diversity tended to make matters worse.”

Our continent is the most ethnically diverse on earth and for some reason we have tended to underestimate how diversity impacts and impedes development.

The reality is that there are sometimes cases where people are elected to positions of power because of tribal sentiment rather than competence. We therefore cannot talk about nation building unless we have dealt with what some refer to as “the demon of tribalism”.

It is this issue that militates against nationhood.

One definition of nation building speaks of “constructing a national identity using the power of the state”. This is all well and good if we have a functional state but what if the state is dysfunctional?

What if the state has more people who are driven by partisanship than by patriotism? What if the people we look at as the state care less about the state of the nation than they do about the state of their pockets?

If our political parties continue to defend their little turfs rather than unify around the goal of nation building surely we should look elsewhere for answers?

What about the role of civil society formations and faith based communities? Surely the many churches spread across the country’s landscape cannot continue to preach an escapist gospel while the people who frequent them are looking for answers to the many social problems bedevilling the nation.

We should also not undermine the power of our individual actions. An example that comes to my mind is of an experience I had in Estonia – a small country on the eastern side of Europe. We had to travel from one side of its capital city, Tallinn, to the other.

Like many European countries Estonia has an efficient public transport system and we used three interconnected buses for our trip. What was strange for me was that the passenger system had no hands on supervision – in other words it was possible to circumvent it and ride the buses without paying.

Our chaperon did something that left an indelible mark on me. She made sure that on every bus we jumped onto we paid for our ride by punching all our tickets in on an unmanned machine situated at the centre of the bus.

When I asked her what was behind her diligence her answer was: “Do you want me to bankrupt my country by not paying for our bus ride?”

I was totally gobsmacked. I had not ever seen a person who connected their personal actions to the state of their nation.

Now can you imagine if every South Africa would also make that connection?

The answer to who is responsible for the task of nation building is therefore quite simple. Every one of us is.