Veterans, church sidelined

YOUR lengthy and punchy editorial regarding the double standards that the ANC has adopted, regarding Makhosi Khoza, nails it on the head.

In my years as a parliamentarian, I often lamented the patent unfairness of the small fish frying while the big were left free to swim and cavort in the copious ocean.

The president who has brought his party into utter and prolonged disrepute, opprobrium and shame, remains unscathed, untouched and exempt from any discipline.

The harm that he and his Gupta-linked ministers have done to the people, the economy, and our international reputation should have been subjected to vigorous internal disciplinary measures and prosecution by the NPA. This matter, which is crying out for action, remains shelved.

The supreme irony is that the one person willing to demonstrate that the ANC has the capacity and the will for internal correction, Makhosi Khoza, is now going to be “fried”. A genuine peoples’ MP will be silenced tragically and her colleagues will allow the looting of the Treasury to continue to the detriment and chagrin of the taxpayers and the poor people.

The question that every ANC leader and supporter needs to answer is the one that you have asked, namely: “What is it that makes a party’s national executive ignore the pleas of its veterans – people who sacrificed so much and gave their all out of love and commitment for the ANC?” What is the answer to this question?

To that can be added the question of why the ANC insists that the church stays out of politics when the church was so central to the Struggle against apartheid. So too were the many outspoken academics, and why should they stop their activism now?

Voters should be clear about the ANC’s unwillingness to self-correct. All those who plead to be given the space to do so are whistling in the wind. They have been rendered impotent and ineffectual. In the context of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Napoleon now rules and poor Boxer after his enormous sacrifice at the Battle of the Windmill is hauled off to the glue factory. Power is cynical.