Cry Majumba!

CRY MAJUMBA!

Nearly fifty years ago, while what Harold Macmillan called "the wind of change" was burbling through the great belly of Africa, a bright-eyed, eager young man, perhaps from the Foreign Office, was addressing a tribal gathering of an African colony. He told them of the freedom and true self-government that they were to be given.

They waved their spears and cried with one voice: "Majumba!"

He continued: " . . . and our financial institutions will give you massive low-interest economic investment loans . . ."

"Majumba!"

" . . . with which the leaders of your own wise democratically-elected governments will revitalise and modernise your production, making it part of the great multinational world economy, bringing you happiness, peace and ever-growing prosperity!"

"Majumba! Majumba!" they cried and danced and sang.

The Paramount Chief came to the young man, his face wreathed in smiles. "Magnificent speech, dear boy," he said "and as a mark of their appreciation the Elders have invited you to visit the shrine of the Sacred Bull. That visit is seen as a great honour by our people. He is rarely shown and almost never cleaned out, so perhaps I should warn you to mind your nice clean shoes in the majumba".

All right, it probably never happened and even as a joke it wasn't very funny. Mercifully, in view of what was to happen to Africa in the years to come, it was soon forgotten. But recently, albeit in a reverse form, it has been coming back to me.

Today, when a bright-eyed eager chap with a glued-on smile comes on telly and says: "I feel I have to tell you that what we all have to realise is that in spite of setbacks we have kept our revised and retargeted programmes fully on track and that these are now being acclaimed by all sections of society as a resounding success . . ." (or words of that sort), I am moved to leap up, wave a spear and shout "Majumba!"

I am only moved to do so. In practice the opposite happens. I crumple into my chair and mutter: "Young man, I'm very sorry, but I don't believe you. Please understand that I don't actually disbelieve you, but what I feel you have to realise is that whether or not your words turn out to be true, your saying of them has absolutely no effect one way or the other on whether or not I think they are true. In fact the only effect they have is to warn me to keep an eye on that particular subject, in case you're up to something.

"I'm afraid that's very uncharitable of me, dear boy, and I do know that as you are the Prime Minister you are, by virtue of that fact, entitled to respect. Consequently I have to remember that even if I am being lied to, it is only by necessity. I realise that, although I am not privy to it, you almost certainly have a political agenda which requires me to be unquestioningly convinced that what you say is true. But, unfortunately, I have to admit that I have given way to doubt, and I find in myself a baleful determination to reserve credence, to wait and judge by results . . .sorry."

There is something familiar about this process. We all get quantities of 'junk-mail' in the post. It is cleverly crafted towards one purpose only - to gain our trade by promising us goodies. I am equally baleful towards these, but I don't seriously mind them because I know that as far as the giant retail corporations are concerned, we are just customers, faceless units of consumption to be persuaded, by any means within the law, to buy things. And, as far as groceries are concerned, I suppose that is fair enough, so long as they can deliver the goods.

So why, I wonder, does a supermarket-style government, which appears to be being run by a small group of sales-executives who seem to have been given the right to override the usual legislative processes, and whose 'junk-mail' is similarly crafted in plausible sales language to gain and maintain our support, get up my nose. After all it is really doing no more than exercising democracy - government by the will of the people. When it sends teams out into the community to ask customers what goodies they would most like to have and then promises that their Party will provide them, it is only conducting 'market research' - collecting the fancies of the electorate in order to maximise support. That is, by definition, democracy in action - discovering the wishes of the people and obtaining the power to govern by promising to provide them - so what am I wingeing about?

One answer is that a government is different from a supermarket, and that the present government's failure to observe this fact is both unwise and dangerous.

The crucial difference is that a government is not dealing in the short-term supply of groceries, it is dealing in the long-term reality of people's lives. Consequently, however hard the government tries to maintain the pretence that everything in the world is safe for us and lovely, however craftily it manipulates its image and targets its resources to maintain maximum electability for itself, as time passes and it becomes clear that the goodies it promised are not in practice turning up, and that, notwithstanding its constant praise for itself, the infrastructure of the country seems to be substandard and crumbling, people are inevitably going to notice that they are being conned. When that happens they naturally get fed up and cease to 'believe in' mainstream politics. Then they either just turn away or go for some other more simplistic and exciting cause.

That is one seriously dangerous aspect of this mendacious carry-on. I am convinced that the main reason for 'political apathy' is not so much happy complacency as a profoundly bored disenchantment. People have lost interest in the apparently fruitless business of turning out to vote, and so the electoral field is being left clear for the ever-zealous bigots, extremists and fundamentalists to whip up their hate-votes.

Of course politicians have always tried to persuade. They have to, it's their job. But in the past there have been politicians, even ones in government, who have had understandable principles and policies, who have told us, in words which we can understand, what they were going to do and why, and have stood by it, who have treated the people of the country as if they had brains, have respected them and taken them into their confidence in bad times as well as good. In those days Parliament itself was respected by the people, because at least we knew we were being dealt with fairly honestly, even when we didn't necessarily agree with its policies (Come to think of it Mrs.Thatcher is a case in point!).

Perhaps one day some statesman or stateswoman will surface, one who will hold the good of the country and the welfare of the world above the partisan tag-match of politics and have the courage to risk telling the actual unadorned truth to the people; one who will possess the stature to be believed. Then perhaps Parliament might begin to win back some of the trust and respect that it has lost.

Yes, and pigs might fly. As things are today it seems likely that the current loss of trust in government will be seen by the PR department of our current 'market-leader' political Party as no more than an indication that it needs to repackage its image. It could perhaps adopt some newly-crafted version of the "Honest John" approach, one in which it would be seen to be bravely accepting culpability for peccadillos while keeping quiet about and fogging over the slippery bits, hoping they won't backfire.

And backfire is what they have done very recently - on an international scale!

The story is common knowledge but perhaps I could briefly recount the thread of it.

The United States, declaring that the Iraqi regime was evil, decided to depose it. To this end it massed a huge army in Kuwait.
In view of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Iraq's undoubtedly deranged dictator, this was seen by many people and nations to be a worthwhile project.

However, if one nation unilaterally decides to invade and conquer another nation just because it doesn't like the way it is behaving, it is in serious breach of International Law, serious because it sets a precedent by which it could do the same to any other nation which doesn't happen to share its views and standards, and particularly serious in this case because the US has made no secret of its wish to impose American-style democracy on the Middle East and has had no hesitation in condemning other nations in the area as part of the same "axis of evil" as Iraq. Consequently to the nations in the region, many of which vehemently loathed the Iraqi regime, the idea of invading Iraq was, equally vehemently, seen as only being acceptable if it were to be to be specifically approved and overseen by the United Nations. To put it politely, the Middle East was understandably suspicious of the US's motives in proposing to occupy parts of it.

Nevertheless, the present UK government joined the US project and duly sent a supporting army to Kuwait. Mindful perhaps that the proposed invasion was publicly unpopular, it sought to highlight an emergency by emphasising the danger posed by the Iraqi regime's alleged possession of 'weapons of mass destruction'. This culminated in the Prime Minister's announcing to Parliament that Iraq possessed an arsenal of 'weapons of mass destruction' that were being held ready to be unleashed in a matter of minutes!

As Iraq had long been infested with UN inspectors diligently seeking, but not finding, any evidence of the existence of 'weapons of mass destruction', this particular piece of news was received with some scepticism, a scepticism which had to be allayed by references to dossiers of 'intelligence information' some of which, in the event, turned out to be of dubious validity.

However, as we know, after a last round of frenzied diplomacy, the US declared that the Iraqi regime was being deliberately uncooperative and went ahead with the invasion.

No 'weapons of mass destruction' have been found, nor, after all this time, can one expect that any are likely to be found. Consequently it is now reasonable to assume that there weren't any usable ones there in the first place.

This must mean either that our Government knowingly lied to Parliament, or, alternatively, that the Prime Minister had been misinformed by his advisers, who had chosen to regard as fact, information that was no more than unsubstantiated conjecture. Either way the responsibility for what the Prime minister says to Parliament lies with the Prime Minister himself and it is he, not his personal advisers, who is finally answerable for it.

Of course there is plenty of evidence to show that the President of Iraq was a serial mass-murderer, and of course there is no doubt that the world is well rid of him, but even so the inescapable fact remains that the public-relations strategy of our government and its PR department has resoundingly backfired. By choosing to give out unsubstantiated claims as if they were established facts, it has misled Parliament and brought it into disrepute. As a result the government has lost all semblance of veracity, has broken the political equivalent of the Trade Descriptions Act and has forfeited the right to expect anybody to believe anything it says.

In this circumstance there is only one course which an honourable government can take. The Prime Minister should admit that, in a crucial matter, he gave the House false information. He should apologise and offer to resign and seek a new mandate from the electorate. That would go some way to restoring the respect that Parliament deserves and must have if it is to function.

But (as already noted) pigs might fly. No doubt the government sees as its principal priority the need to fend off any criticism of its all-important 'corporate image'. So it continues to assert, with mounting absurdity, that the terrible weapons will be found, while at the same time frantically looking for scapegoats and transparently attempting to distract public attention by attacking minor players with questions about who said what to whom and whether or not they ought to have done so.

It is a shameful exercise in slithering. It is also tedious, basically irrelevant, damaging, insulting and wholly unconvincing.

"Majumba!"

Oliver Postgate August 2003

Ps: I am most grateful to THE OLDIE magazine (www.theoldie.co.uk) for publishing the first part of this article in November 2002.

OP.

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