Henry Petersen
Very often during interviews on television, I have heard the phrase: “we need to” or worse “they need to”. This happened this morning again. A cabinet minister was interviewed about a crisis in the country that needed urgent attention. During this interview I heard the phrase several times “we need to”. So we are left with the expectation that something needs to be done, but not with the commitment that it will, in fact, be done. There is always the mystical someone out there that everybody waits for to do what “needs to be done”.
This reminds me of the story that goes: There was an important job that “needed to be done”. Anybody could have done the job that everybody expected somebody to do. So everybody waited for somebody to do it. Eventually, nobody did what anybody could have done. Soon everybody realized that nobody had done what anybody could have done. So everybody became angry and blamed everybody else because nobody did what anybody could have done.
Our wonderful country is in the mess. The list is long from load shedding; the lack of potable drinking and cleaning water – despite the heavy rains we have experienced; roads that have become impassable because of potholes; poor sanitation; near starvation in some parts of the country; high crime rates; gender-based violence; child molestation; hospitals that have descended into death centres; schools that are wracked with inter- learner violence and with racial skirmishes - to name but a few of our challenges. Then we hear people in high places saying: “This that and the other need to be done”. So once the problem has been identified and studied, everybody waits for someone to do what “needs to be done”. Inevitably nothing gets done.
Then there is our national sport: Planning without implementation. There are wonderful plans that we hear of from time to time on how this, that or the other “needs to be done”. However, when it comes to implementation then nobody does what somebody should do. What South Africa needs; are leaders that say I am busy doing or I have done. Leaders who actually follow through with Thuma Mina.
Mercifully there are organisations such as The Gift of the Givers that, have no time to wait for something to be done. They just do it. Whenever there is a crisis in the country they move in and do what needs to be done. June 16, we celebrate the stand taken by school children in 1976, when they decided to do something about their grievances in education. They did not wait for leaders, who needed to do something. No, they just did what had to be done. In the process, many died. We salute them posthumously. When will our leaders in government and our executives and administrators copy the example set by those workers in that organisation and children in Soweto forty-six years ago? When will, the narrative change from wishful thinking to action?
Petersen is a former principal and education consultant