Prosecute opportunistic Gupta ‘captors’

IF ONLY there were a dozen more patriotic (not partisan) parliamentarians, then Jacob Zuma would now be consigned to the political dustbin.

This incompetent president – aided and abetted by a discredited ANC – has accelerated the precipitous decline of South Africa into junk status, with a plummeting economy and rising criminality. Only ANC beneficiaries, self-serving “cadres” and groups like the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) shamelessly defend the likes of Zuma. Remember that the MJC’s president boasted, “I am Zuma’s man” in last year’s local elections.

Even though the parliamentary vote to evict Zuma from the presidency failed, all stake-holding citizens should demand two high priority changes – one legal and the other constitutional – to reassert the primacy of the people and not the party in power. Only bold pragmatic measures will prevent South Africa’s headlong descent into a banana republic.

First, legal moves must be instituted immediately to prosecute the Guptas on corruption, graft and racketeering charges. These carpet-bagging immigrants with no proven loyalty to this country are today’s reprehensible replicas of 19th-century foreign robber barons like Cecil Rhodes, Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit and other buccaneers who ruthlessly exploited this land and its labour.

The opportunistic Guptas arrived with minuscule funds to run a small computer company, but somehow within two decades became multi-billionaires on the back of illicit political manoeuvring, breathtaking influence-peddling and shocking state capture.

They must be prosecuted and jailed for subverting South African law, then be stripped of their (Gigaba-facilitated) citizenship prior to deportation to their homeland.The second step is a pressing judicial amendment to the South African constitution to forestall any recurrence of what transpired last Tuesday in the National Assembly. Parliamentarians should be elected on the basis of a specific constituency, district or area, instead of nomination by a political party. This is more democratic and less partisan. South Africa’s post-apartheid dispensation needs this constitutional modification to give power to the people, taking it away from miscreant politicians.

With the ANC’s integrity and reputation in tatters, let us seize the moment and deal Zuptism a fatal blow by restoring South Africa’s democracy.