How do they get away with despoiling the beloved country?

WHO is enjoying the best life of all in South Africa?

Who is operating considerably above the law and with startling impunity? Who is revelling in the exercise of almost total power and clinging on to it for dear life?

Who is it that can keep an employee in the freezing cold in the middle of the night and remain unchallenged?

Who is it that can brutally beat up a woman and even though he is caught in the act on camera still remain in the office of a deputy minister?

Who is it that can operate a state department as a personal fiefdom and employ her uncle, relatives and friends in their multitude without following proper processes and be free of consequences?

Who is it that can preside so recklessly over Sassa with powers unconstrained by any law and with a dubious agenda to boot?

Who is it that can allow the capture of the state to spin out of control and chuckle about not being mentioned in the scandalous and outrageous e-mails that have come to light?

Who is it that can junk South Africa’s credit rating and plunge our country into a recession and survive while 48 000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of this year and a calamitous 1 130 000 jobs between April and June?

Under whose watch has Eskom, Prasa and SAA leaked billions?

The short answer is that it is the ANC of the present time that is wreaking untold havoc economically, politically, educationally, socially, morally and ethically with utmost nonchalance and abiding indifference.

The project of nation-building has fallen by the wayside. Racial bigotry, race baiting, violence, murder, hijacking and assassinations are daily occurrences that are creating fear in wide swathes of the nation.

The demise of the Scorpions has let loose the dogs of human ugliness and depravity on all of us. Black and white and all shades in-between are subject to constant danger. The rot that is spreading from the top is threatening to engulf the body politic.

When a chunk of the ANC broke away in 2008 to form Cope it did so not to oppose what it had been all along but out of conviction that it was certainly going to morph into something else under its glorious name. Cope saw itself not as an opposition party but as an alternative to keep alive what was good and noble in the ANC that they had served with distinction until then.

The founders of Cope understood with great clarity that the values that the ANC had subscribed to until then were going to be rapidly compromised and wittingly violated.

What was sacred before is now both banal and insidious. The present incumbent will not give up power whatever the cost.

The insufferable and unmitigated despoliation of our scarce resources by the few for the massive benefit of a powerful coterie requires the collective and organised soft power of God-conscious people in the nation to let the centre hold again. Chaos is at large.

Order will only come from voters who will do much more than merely cast their vote and then step back to complain and be disregarded. Something will have to give if society fails to respond to the heightening challenge. Farouk Cassim Milnerton