National dream is dashed

President Jacob Zuma’s real crime is stealing our national dream that sustained us during the terrible 1980s.

We glimpsed it when Roelf Meyer and Cyril Ramaphosa danced to “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” at Codesa and on election day in 1994 when, in Time magazine’s brilliant phrasing, “the oppressor and the oppressed joined hands”.

We also glimpsed it at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration, when four generals saluted the president-elect as he emerged from his car and escorted him to the podium, handing over of the reins of state and symbolically shutting out the prospect of civil war.

We glimpsed it in the dancing in the dark streets of Doornfontein after the Rugby World Cup victory, during the 2010 Soccer World Cup, which Mark Gevisser perfectly expressed as “for the first time we can say ‘we’ ”.

And again at Mandela’s memorial service where, despite the rain, the poor sound and unruly crowd, my overriding impression was the big, warm, noisy, chaotic, heart of Africa embracing its favourite son, and all of us with him.

Zuma’s biggest crime is not his kleptocratic agency, neglect of the economy, or fuelling of the trust deficit.

It’s his theft of our dream of a nation of which we can be proud.

But the dream hasn’t died — it lives on, sorely troubled, like the church in Samuel Stone’s hymn, The Church’s One Foundation.

It lives on in the people who toil daily for little reward, stay honest in the face of endemic bribery, care for their neighbours and affirm our shared humaneness.

Chris Hock

Houghton