JUDITH FEBRUARY | The dangers of blind trust: How our actions enable political irresponsibility

We live in a noisy and boundary-less world. Anything can be said or done. Everything is happening at once and at breakneck speed.

Daily, we witness megalomaniacs upending the world because they can. In this world, the strong are not constrained by the rules and the weak are dispensed with — whether in Africa or Palestine.

Lies are served up as truth.

The politics of the day is complex, with each day bringing some fresh hell stoked by lies in Washington. As the world's superpower seems to be sleepwalking into authoritarianism, no one is untouched by Trump, who like a mad king, rules by fiat.

In South Africa, this has created complications of its own, partly because of the genocide case against Israel brought before the ICJ and our Expropriation Act.

With the African Growth and Opportunity Act up for negotiation and no South African ambassador in Washington, we seem up the creek without a paddle.

While it goes without saying that the relationship with the United States is crucial, one does wonder how any South African ambassador will navigate the "incoherence" of the Trump administration.

And South Africa is not "future fit," unfortunately, and so the nimbleness we need to navigate this extraordinary new world is missing. We have spent the Zuma years caught up in State Capture and nepotism while denuding every institution that is needed to actually make things work.

Only last week we heard about the chaos at the SANAE IV base in Antarctica, the failure to maintain our airports and their navigational systems, and added to this, we have a water crisis, and of course, electricity is an ongoing crisis. There are many others, too many to mention.

We have not taken care. The Ramaphosa presidency has fallen far short of taking the action needed to fix our infrastructure and the economy, even though many aspects of Operation Vulindlela should be lauded.

We may speak the language of modern governance on issues like climate change, for instance, but the ANC is a relic that has spawned a corrupt, incapable state that is unable to do much. In addition, the ANC, having lost its electoral majority, appears unable to fathom that it cannot govern alone.

The failure to pass a Budget in February was a disgrace, and since then, the ANC and DA have predictably been arguing in public about VAT increases and such like, seeming to use the media as a negotiating tool. Every day we are bombarded with reports of the GNU collapsing.

At the time of writing, the fiscal framework had just been adopted by Parliament with the DA saying it would bring a legal challenge. So the GNU is teetering on the brink. But, we have heard this so many times that we blink and move on, though quite how the DA will remain in the GNU is very hard to predict.

In Parliament on Wednesday, ANC MPs were shamelessly celebrating in the House. On display was that party's arrogance and how careless it is with its diminished power.

And so given the above, how will South Africa become "future fit" given the instability we are experiencing within the GNU and various dangerous pretenders to the throne - (and Trump's new and punitive tariffs added to our woes?) The Sibyl’s leaves are heady with chaos here, our collective fate in the hands of feckless politicians. If we want any chance at that, we need adults to enter the room and get down to the business of fixing our country.

It also means bringing an element of seriousness to the government and being discerning about who represents us all as South Africans, within Cabinet and outside of it (ambassadors, for instance).

This must apply to the current GNU and any future government we have. Systems fail and institutions lose their credibility when the wrong people head them up and when we normalise the abnormal. Again, think Donald Trump and, of course, Jacob Zuma and his administration. The latter’s presidency too was littered with dangerous farce.

Sports, Arts and Culture has long been a ministry where shamed politicians go to while away time. The ANC has never really taken this portfolio seriously, which is shameful and says everything about what the party prioritises.

So, when a Sunday newspaper reported that Gayton McKenzie had appointed Jonas White, a Patriotic Alliance member and former ANC mayor, to the council of the Market Theatre, we should not be surprised. McKenzie himself is a convicted felon, after all.

White, it is alleged, is known to be close to McKenzie and was found guilty by the ANC of sexual harassment and then convicted of corruption by a court. Quizzically, the headline called McKenzie's decision a "sex pest blunder".

Women’s rights take another tumble.

Several pages later, the same Sunday paper in its "Society" page (or some such, which is always a reflection of the inanity of the times) reported glowingly on McKenzie who had the assembled crowd "eating out of his hand", "with his newfound love for the arts" (sic). McKenzie regaled the crowd, recalling his appointment to the GNU.

McKenzie is a well-known driver of xenophobia and hate and is patently unfit to represent our country, let alone on matters of arts and culture. As Richard Pithouse has written, "When McKenzie and the Patriotic Alliance were brought into the government of national unity, all its participants knew that they were right-wing populists whose xenophobia was openly at odds with the Constitution."

There is a reason he expressed a desire for the Home Affairs portfolio.

McKenzie is unfit to be a Cabinet minister and decidedly unfit to be in the portfolio he occupies.

As citizens, we need to think carefully about how our individual and corporate actions encourage a lack of accountability and poor decision-making by politicians. We should not blindly acquiesce to the smooth-talking of someone representing us who is ethically bankrupt and a fomenter of hate.