What politicians do, the decisions they make and the pronouncements which they place in the public domain have to do first and foremost with what they perceive to be best for their political fortunes. Their behaviour is a function of calculations that have to do with consolidating their power, never mind the platitudes which they customarily spout about ‘putting the nation first.’ Politicians are usually inclined to pay much keener attention to what we loosely describe as ‘the national interest’ in so far as that ‘interest’ is good for the enhancement of their own political fortunes.
The start of the year usually offers a timely political moment. The New Year is a time of fulsome opportunity for the outpouring of altruistic sentiments wrapped in carefully rehearsed messages. It is, after all, the beginning of a new year, a time when hope springs eternal, when much of the nation is assumed to be reasonably disposed to giving and receiving kind sentiments. It is open season for politicians.
For politicians’ New Year messages are, by and large, palliatives, contrived and repetitive pronouncements, dripping with cynicism. They are deceptions of the worst kind since they not only hijack the spirit of the yuletide season but, in fact, target their audiences with the entirely misleading notion, that something can come from nothing, that there is even a remote basis for believing that somehow, the year ahead will bring some dramatic improvement to the political climate.
We can judge for ourselves from the sharply drawn battle lines, the preponderance of political invective and the manner in which the National Assembly has been reduced to a cauldron of confrontation, that there is, at this time, no real basis for believing that politically at least, 2014 is likely to be a ‘Happy New Year.’ What is even less likely is that the underpinning in the messages about ‘putting the nation first’ will even be remotely realized in a society that is as politically divided as it ever was.
So that the New Year wishes emanating from our politicians ought not to fill us with any great optimism. In fact, the very sentiments expressed in those messages appear to be underpinned by the assumption that we are a nation of fools, that we can, year in, year out, be victims of delusion, that we have learnt nothing from the previous years of similar unfulfilled sentiments. If only for the sake of our collective self-respect, ought we not to say this time around that the dichotomy between the sentiments expressed in the New Year messages of our politicians and the political reality on the ground is simply too great to have us believe that 2014 will be any different?
Of course, there will always be those who will be drawn to the New Year messages about turning over a new leaf, though it is hard to believe that their interest arises out of anything more than a fear that, to ignore the messages, might cause them to become afflicted with a sense of utter hopelessness. After all does what the politicians say in their New Year messages not embody some measure of hope that we can, after all, work together for the good of the nation however unlikely the prospect of that hope being reaslised at this time?
Nor is it that most of us have not seen through the fallacies in those messages. We endure them, however, mostly without murmur, out of a sense of tiredness, or worse, resignation, understanding that there is really no limit to the cynicism of politicians and that there is little that we can do to change the script. Over time we have become Orwellian creatures. We respond to the New Year messages by studiously ignoring them, understanding only too well that the sentiments which they seek to convey are really no more than pipe dreams. That way, we do not have to take them seriously.
The real truth is – and our the politicians might even concede this in their quiet moments – that the New Year messages are part of a routine political curriculum. They are opportunistic public pronouncements that are, in effect, extensions of a seasonal ‘feel good’ interregnum. In reality, the customary forms of political behaviour simply refuse to change. Surely a point has now been reached where our politicians might wish to consider keeping their New Year sentiments to themselves, unless they are prepared to match their platitudes with a far greater measure of commitment to actualizing the ‘wishes’ and ‘pledges’ which they so readily commit to paper.
