Point of View: The monster the ANC has created will turn around and savage it

- Mondli Makhanya (Sunday Times Editorial, 03 August 2008)

 

I remember the British guy sitting opposite me in the restaurant back in 1993. He was some kind of fixer/ agent/businessman — one of those shifty types with indeterminate information on their business cards.

This guy had been around the block a few times and he knew a lot. As a result he was cynical about governments and politicians, be they First World or Third. He was quite open about the fact that he made money on various continents by "fixing".

He had asked for this meeting after being struck by something I had written, and wanted to chat about the transition.

At some point during the conversation he boasted that arms dealers were already taking ownership of ANC leaders, ahead of the installation of a democratic government.

He rattled off the names of who was in the pockets of the Brits, who was taking favours from the Germans and who was being courted by the French.

He did point out that most ANC leaders were proving hard nuts to crack as they were still focused on this liberation thing rather than the spoils of liberation.

Nonetheless, some were biting.

The ANC and the National Party may be divided at the negotiations, he told me, but the one thing they were agreed on was the need for an arms deal.

I must confess, I was a naive idealist back then and could not countenance the heroes of the revolution being lured by dirty arms dealers.

So I argued furiously with him and told him that my country would be different. You know that South African thing — we were always going to be different.

But alas, like all political parties the world over, it did not take the ANC too long to be sullied by the spoils of power.

And, as the man in the restaurant had predicted, the arms deal was the beginning of this descent.

As we report in today's newspaper, the two men at the pinnacle of our politics were right at the centre of it all.

And as the years went by, the liberators transmogrified into just another bunch of self-interested politicians, no different in avarice from the Tories or Angola's MPLA.

I saw the leaders of our erstwhile liberation movement on television the other day.

Slouching on the couches of the Lanseria airport lounge, they warned of fire, brimstone, scud missiles, nuclear warheads and all manner of mayhem that would befall this nation if Jacob Zuma were tried for corruption.

There they were, people who were once good and logical, mouthing off radical gibberish.

There was Mathews Phosa, one of the ANC's foremost legal minds and one of the authors of our constitution, ominously warning the republic's highest court: "We respect their decision, but they must know that in this country there are different constituencies. We do not agree with their view."

There was Gwede Mantashe, one of the Left's brightest thinkers and someone universally hailed for moral rectitude in the trade union movement, promising to accompany Zuma to the Union Buildings regardless of his guilt.

Elsewhere in this very lovely city of Johannesburg, the Umkhonto weSizwe Veterans' Association was attacking the judicial system and stating that the Constitutional Court was now also part of the conspiracy to stop Zuma from becoming president.

The Young Communist League's Buti Manamela was frothing at the mouth, describing Chief Justice Pius Langa's comments in court as "extremely poisonous". Then, of course, there was the obligatory, verbose demagoguery from Julius Malema: "Zuma must be president whether there is a court case or not."

There are times I have to pinch myself and wonder whether this is really happening.

Has the ANC become no different from David Koresh's cult at Waco, with everyone under some mystical spell?

One has to wonder if there is really not a single person in the organisation's 86-member national executive who sees the inferno the nation is being led into — just as the followers of Koresh, Jim Jones and other cult lords were misled.

Tomorrow the ANC's entire leadership will be in Pietermaritzburg to engage in cultish behaviour and echo demands that Zuma not be tried for corruption and fraud so that he can proceed to the Union Buildings and oversee the nation's finances. With them will be thousands more who will be incited to do their damnedest to prevent the law taking its course.

Pietermaritzburg will be shut down, the KwaZulu-Natal economy will be shaken and the schooling of black kids disrupted as all are enjoined to defend the cult master from the law of the land. By the sounds of things, this will be just the opening salvo in a protracted and ugly war.

I have said before that I am now very afraid of the ANC. But I believe the ANC should also be very afraid of itself.

The ratcheting up of emotions and militant rhetoric may sound sweet to Zuma's ears today and may guarantee people's political careers. But, by golly, the monster that the ANC is creating will come back to bite its own progenitors!

If there is anything the ANC should be defending, it is the constitutionality of our state — not those who seek to subvert it. But maybe that is just idealistic claptrap that resides in the heads of those of us who still believe our nation can be different.

Click here: http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/Insight/Article.aspx?id=814230

(I've posted the entire article above, as opposed to a taster with a link back to the full article on the website. It's because the The Times website is hideously slow and quite often dysfunctional.)