The Big Read: Our rude signs should not be aimed at Jantjie

The Thamsanqa Jantjie episode tells you a lot about what's wrong with South Africa. The poor man has been slandered back and forth as a fraud, a murderer, a schizophrenic prone to violent outbursts, an incompetent opportunist, a human rights violator, and much more.

However, in a revealing interview with radio personality Eusebius McKaiser, the clearly broken Jantjie asked a very embarrassing question that went something like this: "Why now? You used me all the time and only now you tell me I cannot do my job."

I know, Deaf South Africa complained to the ANC about the poor man, but his point is a different one - nobody told him. At that point my sympathies shifted solidly behind the short, expressionless, confused man.

By hiring Jantjie over and over again at big functions, the elusive company he works for gave him a sense of accomplishment. To round on Jantjie, therefore, is an error of analysis. What we should be asking is: Who hired the man for one event after another? Why was his competence as a sign language interpreter not tested ahead of an event to be watched by millions across the planet? How on earth could the man, standing within metres of world leaders, not have been screened by official security, given his violent history? Did anyone understand the gravity of the security threat?

My problem is not with Jantjie.

It is the same kind of error of analysis that tries to identify the booing individuals in a stadium filled with thousands of mourners. Apparently, the goal is to blame and shame the booers. Rather than ask why free citizens would express their disgust in such a public way about our leadership, we try to hunt them down to deal with the dissenters.

Go into any dysfunctional school and ask the teachers what is wrong with that school. The responses will focus on what is wrong with the students - they are lazy, use drugs, fall pregnant, have no ambition, are disrespectful and more. There is absolutely no capacity for self-reflection through questions such as: What am I doing wrong as a teacher?

Ask department officials what is wrong with that school and they will point to recalcitrant teachers and incompetent headmasters. They will not ask: How can we better resource the school and mentor the teachers for greater performance?

Ask the unions why schools are underperforming and they will not point the finger at their fee-paying members, the teachers, but at the government officials who are not doing their job. They will not reflect on how their serial disruption of the schools of the poor contributes to the huge inequalities of academic achievement.

Nothing is admired more in a leader than the capacity for self-reflection and the ability to say: "I was wrong. I admit my mistakes. I hurt you."

South Africans have the remarkable capacity for forgiveness, and simply acknowledging our complicity in the education mess - as parents who do not take responsibility for our children's education; as teachers who do not teach as if a child's entire future depends on that one lesson; as unionists who fight for teachers' rights without ever compromising the education of their own child; as government officials who do not fight for the children of the poor but hide behind the national or provincial averages that conceal the catastrophe at the bottom two-thirds of our schools.

But that requires Mandelian courage and honesty. The new Nelson Mandela movie, by the way, is a disaster. In an effort to fit a long life into a few hours, it makes too many big leaps of logic without connecting the chain of events that explain the great man's mission of reconciliation and reconstruction. There are too many episodes that give you drama without deliberation, pain without purpose.

What stands out in the film is not Madiba's single-mindedness (or stubbornness, some would say) but his change of course, his concession of weakness, and his commitment to people. What you see in the story of Mandela is not a perfect life but a perfected life. It is this kind of leadership, in education and in politics, that can yet allow us to swerve in time from a terrible collision with some hard realities ahead of us.

Unlike fawning commentators, I see many more Mandelas arising from among the youth. Young leaders who would see in the frightened Jantjie our own frailties, and embrace him to do better.