IN THE Life of Brian, one of British surreal comedy group Monty Python’s films, there is a scene in which a British underground movement at the time of the Roman occupation plots the overthrow of the foreign power.
As a way of mobilising his forces the leader of the insurgency cell asks his comrades: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
The question is supposed to arouse passions, but instead it’s met by far more practical answers.
They start mentioning improvements such as new sanitation methods, aqueducts, improved roads, street lights, medicine and even wine.
The leader of the group is naturally disappointed that his charges seem to praise the oppressor.
This scene has been interpreted in many ways. One of them was that those who most loudly complained about changes in public policy were often its greatest beneficiaries. In other words, they are ungrateful for what the state has done for them.
Since I have never been a member of the Pythons, I will resist the temptation of suggesting what the writers’ true intentions were.
I would like to think that the Pythons have, in their usual style of making important social commentary through comedy, reminded us that human beings recognise that bad governments can do good things.
The resolve to overthrow a government is not always or necessarily commentary on the government’s ability to deliver services, but how it treats them as human beings.
People want more than just things from their government. They want to feel that their lives, their viewpoints and experiences matter in making public policy.
The ANC, which has for the first time since South Africa became a democracy recorded voter endorsement of less than 60 percent, could do well to learn from the Life of Brian.
The reason the British wanted the Romans out was not because they were oblivious of the positive change the occupiers had brought to their shores, just like the many who voted for parties other than the ANC probably recognise that South Africa today is not what it was in 1994.
The British in Python’s sketch and the voters in South Africa in 2016 understood that they couldn’t trade their rights as human beings for anything, even if they could see the utility of what was being offered in exchange for their souls.
They understood that something was wrong with some people enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the population – even as they brought innovations.
The ANC would do well to remember that governance is not only about building tangible things, necessary and useful as they might be. If that were all that mattered, the Romans would have been inundated with requests from populations begging them to colonise them.
Democracy, like justice, must be manifest in the lives of those who are supposed to be benefiting from it.
If it isn’t, something is wrong and no amount of houses or aqueducts will save that government.
By paying too much attention to the bricks-and-mortar projects, the ANC can easily end up like the NP government, which convinced itself it was doing a better job because “our blacks live better than the rest of Africa”.
This the party did as it pointed out the relatively modern amenities South Africa had relative to the rest of the continent.
This isn’t to say governments must stop doing their part in helping those who are unable to help themselves.
The welfare state is a necessary outcome of a society built on a policy of economic disempowerment and deskilling, and refusing to give people the skills for what they need to rely on themselves.
But even as the state does these necessary things, it must remember not to dehumanise the beneficiaries by treating them as mere voting cattle whose intelligence can be insulted at every turn.
The state must set targets for when it will not need to spend as much as it does on the social security net and, together with those who need the state’s assistance, map out how to empower families and communities so that they don’t need to rely on the state for their next meal.
A democratic political system must not be a godfather who sustains his position by dispensing patronage, but one where individuals are able to see possibilities of being their true and best selves.
A political system that promotes the essence of being human and recognises being in power as being in stewardship for the greater good of a greater number has a greater future than one where the human worth is confused with the price of the thing.
The importance of bricks-and-mortar projects cannot be underestimated, but it is in making humans the best they can be that the greatest and most enduring monuments are built.