Green Shoots: False friends and the need for trust in public institutions

I spent some time this week at the beautiful Bertha Retreat Centre in Stellenbosch talking with a few NGO leaders and organisers about accountability and how we can have different conversations about good governance in our country. Very early over coffee, we were sharing stories of how communities on the Cape flats are sheltering gangsters from the police. I had heard on the radio that Westbury residents threw stones at the police anti- gang unit when they tried to arrest a man for possession of drugs. It was these issues that contributed to our exploration of how we engage with local communities. The democracy project of the last 30 years has made some notable achievements particularly in the promotion of human rights and the legal framework within which we live and work. We are less likely to be subject to arbitrary arrest than that supposed bastion of freedom across the Atlantic Ocean.

But we are also living in a time when community trust in public institutions is perilously low, and the implications are dire. As Hetherington puts it: ‘A decline in institutional trust is linked with “a rise in societal fragmentation, where citizens become more prone to endorse populist and anti-establishment movements”. We spoke in the winter winelands sun about how communities are finding greater resonance with social formations that exist outside of the legal framework.

The gangsters and vigilantes, the big man with the extensive criminal enterprise offer greater promise of support to people struggling to eke out a living and survive. This isn’t a necessarily a comfortable and easy option for communities. They would have years of experience of service providers failing, of corruption and disregard of public duty, of absent compassion. I believe that these community choices are an expression of the widespread despondency with a system that is failing to recognise the aspirations of ordinary people, of youth who can’t get jobs, and women who run the gauntlet each day with their bodies and their very lives.

Clouter et al argue that when ‘citizens trust institutions, they are more likely to show solidarity with  other community members, respect laws and regulations, support government policies and programmes, and develop optimism about the future, a crucial  determinant of economic growth’ (My disclaimer: economic growth isn’t the silver bullet).

When we do the analysis of South Africa, we make the necessary informed generalisations in order to get the big picture and investigate the foundational causes of the problems. The picture isn’t great, and we can get depressed. Or we live and work in a particular area that is the poster child of this dysfunctional reality, where crime and fragmentation dominate our daily journey, and we cannot see anything but this.

But we also know that human beings are complex and interesting creatures who are more than simply subjects upon whom the environment has its way. Hewson identifies three properties of human beings that give rise to agency: intentionality, power, and rationality. 

Agency is our sense of what we can do, the capacity for action in all of us. These properties are what we need to tap into if we are to support the resistance. We hold our own agency and we support it in those around us to refuse to pay homage to the godfather in our midst that will break our society, and commit instead to conversations and actions that build the institutions that will hold us and the relationships that can sustain hope.

These are not academic statements with no grounding in reality – I am often accused of wearing rose-coloured glasses. In the work I do, we encounter scores of people and organisations who choose to lay the bricks of building something good in the midst of the mess, who refuse to let anyone take away their agency. Imagine how many such people there must be who we are not seeing, who continue to resist the false alternative offered? There’s an energy in communities that can be tapped for engagement and constructive work, and we must be encouraged and inspired by it to carry on the resistance.