Is the National Dialogue a distraction or democratic necessity?

There’s been a lot written about President Cyril Ramaphosa’s upcoming National Dialogue. Some of it overwrought, some quite profound, but the biggest question has been why?

There is an argument that it’s nothing more than a distraction. There’s the typical row over who has been invited and who isn’t.

There’s also the historical context: we’ve had national lekgotlas before; Codesa, which helped us peacefully and properly extricate South Africa from centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid.

There have been commissions: from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission into human rights abuses during apartheid to the Zondo commission into state capture, not forgetting the Farlam commission into Marikana or the Moseneke commission into Life Esidimeni. All of these, it could be argued, were necessary to “help shape the next chapter of our democracy”.

The problem is none of them have met with much approval after their conclusion, despite the cost and effort.

Politician Vladimir Lenin famously said religion was the opiate of the masses, distracting them from their suffering.

We don’t know what he thought of sport, but modern sport has replaced the circus – the gladiator version not Boswell and Wilkie – as a distraction.

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Successive Roman emperors would host “games” featuring lions and Christians, slaves and professional gladiators, beating the hell out of the other in an orgy of gore and mass hysteria to take the audience’s minds off what was happening outside the stadium.

Sport does that here, whether it’s Temba Bavuma’s men becoming the best Test cricket team in the world or the Springboks, who open their international season in Cape Town this Saturday.

Everyone gets in on it, from retailers selling affordable and knockoff fan gear, to the fans themselves parsing the team announcements in the next couple of days to see if Rassie Erasmus has got it right against the Barbarians (literally).

It’s the best distraction there is, culminating on Saturday evening and then it starts all over again the next week.

There are some marvellous South Africans named as National Dialogue ambassadors; from Robbie Brozin to Manne Dipico, Imtiaz Sooliman, Nomboniso Gasa, Sibusiso Vilane and, of course, captain Siya Kolisi, but can the nine-month talk shop do anything that elections can’t?

If Ramaphosa really wanted answers, he could just schedule those and get a road map fairly quickly on the next chapter of our democracy.

But is that what he actually wants?

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