Dear DA.

I voted for you. I’ve always voted for you and unless Josh Homme starts a political party, I’m likely to continue voting for you. However, despite the loyalty this implies, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my extreme disappointment at the upcoming implementation of new liquor laws making it illegal to purchase alcohol on a Sunday.

Not because of the inconvenience this is extremely likely to cause me.

Not because of the patronising implication that your constituents are so incapable of arresting their continuous alcohol consumption that you need to mandate what amounts to little other than a ‘sober day’.

Not because the choice of day suggests allegiance to an archaic morality.

No, I’m disappointed because you’re clearly under the impression that this tactic will have some kind of impact on the problems you’re attempting to address. If that’s the case, then I question not only your capacity for the critical thought necessary for making important decisions in general, but also your motives for making this one.

If rampant alcohol abuse is honestly what you were trying to address here, is there not perhaps something more meaningful and sustainable you could have done? Is this really the best idea you came up with? Surely there was SOMEONE attending the  strategy session in which an adult policymaker suggested something this one-dimensional, this naive, this utterly, embarrassingly futile, who pointed out the well established notion that treating the most superficial symptom of something this complex will have no positive affect whatsoever. SURELY?!?

Which brings me to the point I’m trying to make. What were your real motives for this ridiculous law? A cynical observer could argue that perhaps this is an opponent you’re not TRULY willing to engage and that the effort to reward ratio involved in making such little effort was more tenable than attempting to REALLY make a difference.

This is the kind of sophomoric, ineffectual policymaking we’ve become accustomed to in South Africa, and the DA should stand for something better than that.

So get your shit together, because this law is a joke.

So the majority of the noise surrounding the FNB ‘You Can Help’ campaign seems to be focused on whether or not the message they broadcast is relevant and constructive for South Africa and whether or not they were justified in withdrawing it when the ANC started expressing their disappointment.

These are valid discussions. With our government becoming increasingly sensitive to criticism, and their response to such criticism becoming increasingly ham-fisted, it is crucial that we remain aware of the many ways important messages can be censored.

However, what I’ve not really heard anyone discuss is whether or not it’s appropriate for a commercial enterprise to take ANY such provocative stance for, let’s be honest, marketing purposes. There’s no logical association between FNB’s products and the social upheaval they’re so crudely trying to associate their logo with.

This is lifestyle branding at its cynical worst. This bank, an institution that makes the majority of their profits off interest we pay on our debt, are shamelessly co-opting the organic process of citizens acknowledging and expressing discontent through subversive behaviour, for no reason other than gaining access to a demographic they have had difficulty selling their products to in the past.

Here are two facts  that may put this entire debacle into a different perspective:

FNB don’t give a shit. Not about you, not about me, not about any resident of SA. From the day a financial institution is founded until the day we are all vaporised by the exploding sun, a bank will care about nothing, not one single thing, that does not affect their bottom line.

A bank does not benefit from political and social unrest. If their economists and actuaries had found some ingenious method of exploiting such a scenario for profit, you can rest assured they would not have so efficiently yanked the campaign off the airwaves. FNB’s interests are to ‘engineer a better South Africa’ only to the extent that it will result in the more frequent lending of money to their clients.

Any messages that contradict these facts have a different agenda entirely and we are at a point in our awareness of such matters that we should start finding them immediately offensive. By focusing on the pressure applied by the ANC and the bank’s resultant capitulation we are giving credibility to the lies we are being told by an overly ambitious (and soon-to-be unemployed) marketing executive.

Please, let’s recognise this campaign, and all others like it, for the insults that they are.