It has become a tradition that many people become accustomed to having confidantes, mentors, trainers and consultants to provide them with knowledge on their professions to the point where they are dependent on the coach, mentor, trainer, consultant, or even the training manual.
This tradition can be very dangerous for people in national leadership positions, especially in positions that represent public aspirations. When one is in a position of trust, it is important to rely, first and foremost, on the mandate given to you by the people you should serve, and then on metacognitive strategies such as adapting, monitoring, self-regulation, self-reflection, and lead in an exemplary but insightful manner.
Thinking through their thinking, as John Flavell, the founding scholar of “thinking about thinking” or metacognition, once said, is a very important strategy that helps leaders and the general public to think through things before they say or do anything that may be misunderstood or misrepresented.
The media, political leaders and the public in general, all of us are more often than not guilty of confident idiocy by saying and doing things that stand to be easily misunderstood or misrepresented and confuse others in the process.
We have a relatively good constitution; a functioning National Assembly and robust National Council. We hold elections periodically and have smoothly gone through presidential transitions from the first to the third republic. This is commendable and we should be proud of our tremendous achievements in a relatively short time. We, however, dismally failed to address the fundamental systems that kept our country and people in perpetual servitude for more than a century – the laws promulgated to keep us in colonial bondage, herded into and confined in Bantustans. This is because we failed to think about things we should have thought about. We continue to think as though we were programmed by colonisation, and as though we learned nothing from our past. The manner in which we argue or put across our points attests to this.
For example, the continued existence of the Native Administration Proclamation 15 of 1928 and other colonial laws is indefensible, illogical and unconstitutional. To be reminded of words such as “natives” and “police zone”, 26 years after independence, is an insult to the memories of those who died for the liberation of the country – maybe not for those who died for the country but are still alive.
This is notwithstanding the fact that these colonial laws are still with us, and they unashamedly rule supreme over our constitution.
Therefore, there is need for tact when addressing matters related to colonial laws to avoid being misunderstood or misrepresented. The same goes for other policy pronouncements by those who should know better, including shameful remarks by our leaders on how to deal with gender-based violence.
The arguments for and against our colonial psychological inheritance can best be summed up by what one may call Jeffersonism. Though he owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson spoke tirelessly throughout his life against the institution of slavery and for the right of black people to be free.
He argued that there were many factors that prevented him to free his own slaves, including financial, social and political factors. He once said: “The laws do not permit us to turn them (slaves) loose.” He wrote to Edward Bancroft in 1788: “As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.”
Some might agree with him and obviously some might not. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that merely freeing his own slaves was not the best solution, and that the most important step was the elimination of the real source of the injustice, which was the institution of slavery itself. Had Jefferson stopped short of explaining his position on slavery, he would have been misunderstood and misrepresented. Scholars of metacognition would call him a confident idiot for saying what he did.
David Dunning who researched metacognition, the process by which human beings evaluate and regulate their knowledge, reasoning, and learning, found that the results were consistently sobering, occasionally comical, and never dull. At the end, he authored an article entitled “We are all confident idiots” with the subtitle: The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise.
It is therefore not surprising, odd as it is, to find in our midst people who claim political expertise and credentials, asserting their knowledge on matters that they have little knowledge of. William Feather once wrote that being educated means being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.
The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance, as an absence of knowledge, leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education can produce illusory confidence. To a great degree, we fail to recognise the frequency and scope of our ignorance. For poor performers to recognise their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack.
Wisdom has it that the doorstep to the temple of wisdom is the knowledge of our own ignorance. What is unique in our country is that in many cases incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like absolute knowledge. Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all.
• Dr Charles Mubita holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southern California.