Power and Powerlessness
Sandy Grant | Monday December 9, 2013 15:55
One school of thought maintained that a petition would not have been needed if the President had felt that it was in the public interest to postpone matters until next month. Others seem to be firmly convinced that the petition was required in order to provide the President with grounds for intervention and argued that it only needed to prove that it was fraudulent in order to invalidate that particular decision.
A somewhat different line of thought was that the President has such unqualified powers available to him that the petition was in fact irrelevant. In any case, we sat in the dark whilst others were debating these matters. For no less than thirty (30) hours, our electricity was either off, stone cold dead, or flickered, came on, went off, and then came briefly back, still unable to make up its mind. The thieves, (surely too kind a word?) wasted no time and seized the opportunity presented by the lack of light in our part of the village and cut the same length of telephone line that they had removed only a week or so earlier! Presumably the same people were involved using the same ladder, industrial cutter, and truck - and the same place to store their gains and the same dealer to trade them in. If the power supply in our part of Odi continues to be disrupted by the weather, it is likely that this particular length of phone will be cut again and again and again. Why not? Because the government, the BTC, the police, the tribal authorities, the village community are currently collectively unable or unwilling to take action, these particular crooks are given licence to take whatever they want.
Knowing well that they are immune from any form of restraint, they plunder government property at will. They remove; the BTC replaces; they remove and the BTC again expensively replaces - in a now set cycle which no one with any authority is willing to challenge, and with the BTC Board having to accept that this kind of expensive wastage is both routine and unavoidable. If the BTC is powerless to act, who should accept responsibility and take action? The police are already overstretched and cannot be expected to keep an eye on vulnerable lengths of cable line. Individuals in key local communities are unlikely to intervene when they suspect something is amiss in the early morning hours. And the dikgosana with their local police are left as observers on the sidelines.
Despite its enormous expenditure on security and its emplacement of huge police stations up and down the country, the cable crooks have demonstrated repeatedly that central and local government are both powerless and irrelevant. Can this really be possible? What can explain this stunning disinterest, this extraordinary apathy, this willingness to endure such continuing, humiliating losses? My belief is that in a situation of this kind it is the local MP who is the key figure and that it is his/her past disinterest which helps to explain how this form of anarchy, for that is what it is, has been so widely tolerated. MPs in this country's Westminster democratic system are supposed to represent the constituencies that elected them.
I suspect that very few, during the last forty or so years, have done so. I also suspect that neither the BDP nor any of the opposition parties have ever spelt out their expectations of the role that their MPs should perform and in particular how they should relate to other local authorities, and how and when they should assist individuals and communities in need and experiencing specific problems. The resultant ambiguity has left MPs with a role which is reasonably clear at the centre but which is hopelessly unclear at the crucially important local levels.
Tellingly, reports attribute the recent losses of some BDP MPs to their lack of visibility in their constituencies - not to their lack of effectiveness - being around the place being all that is required! But if they start to understand that their responsibility is to help crack problems confronting the people they represent, we would begin to see significant progress.
MPs can bring the government's attention to severe problems such as cable theft, they can take the lead in drawing together all the involved and concerned parties, they can help to work out a strategy which would pull together all those elements which previously were unable to act effectively.
Together with others, MPs should and could eliminate both cable theft and the crooks who, so knowingly, have demonstrated their contempt for the common good, for order and sound government.