Daily Dispatch
Mantashe has wires crossed
FOR anyone who knows him, that wily old political survivor and new chair of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, is an extremely pleasant fellow. But he does sometimes lose the plot.
He did so with spectacular effect this weekend when he lectured South Africans and the Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba about “pressuring the ANC” to remove Jacob Zuma as president of the country.
He also reportedly said “once you shout at it [the ANC], it closes its ranks … it switches off and stops listening”.
There’s so much wrong with this thinking that it’s hard to know where to begin. At the risk of stating the obvious, the ANC is not the centre of South Africa’s universe. Nor should it ever be. The people and the country come first – or are supposed to. A governing party is duty-bound to protect the interests of all the people and develop the country to its full potential. In the process the party is supposed to be responsive to the people’s loud, clear and valid concerns.
None of these constitutionally endorsed priorities should ever be flipped around.
In fact, had the ANC kept these imperatives in mind and listened to the rising cries of the ripped-off nation over the past eight years, the party would not now be frantically trying to mend its own splintered mess with a band-aid called “unity”. Nor would it have tossed aside all basic common sense 10 years ago to appoint, as its leader, a man with 783 charges of corruption over his head.
Every single South African has paid an obscenely high price for that abrogation of moral responsibility which was, unsurprisingly, a monumental blunder.
Our economy continues to flatline and shed jobs. Our young people in townships have sleepless nights because they’re desperately poor and cannot find jobs. Our state-owned-enterprises are so bankrupt they’re an embarrassment. Our reputation as an investment destination is so far down the toilet it’s barely visible. And lawlessness is out on our streets loud and proud because the ANC, like a nodding ornament inside the back-window of a car, saw fit to allow one man to pursue two objectives ever since he took office – to cauterise the system of law and order and to feed an appetite for personal gain that dangerously exceeds human decency.
None of the consequences for this gigantic error have changed. In fact, just last week horrified citizens had to suck up a decision made in dubious circumstances by an even more dubious minister to reinstate Matshela Koko, the patently compromised former acting CEO of the country’s biggest and mostlooted state owned enterprise. And today we report that Eskom’s rules continue to be bent to facilitate dodgy Gupta coal contracts.
For Mantashe to now expect the nation to sit mutely by while the ANC preoccupies itself with factional interests for who knows how long and a possible new-look cabinet that might or might not retain some of the deplorables responsible for the ongoing national smash-and-grab, is frankly irrational.
Neither South Africans nor the archbishop has any reason to trust ANC inertia, let alone to exercise patience about it. Rather it falls on the ANC to reassure citizens that it has its act sufficiently together and has regained the moral backbone to do what needs to be done – to lead – and do so quickly.
Meanwhile, please leave the Arch alone!