Nkosikhulule Nyembezi Insight Don’t waste all your anger on indecisive Cyril
Whoever takes the ANC leadership seat next to re-elected President Cyril Ramaphosa must commit to putting the country before personal gain.
Such a commitment is urgently necessary to restore confidence in the party amid talk in some quarters of imminent plans of watering down the political party funding legislation to pave the way for the spraying around of more secret millions of rand with the wantonness of a football player wielding a magnum of champagne.
Without a commitment to put the country first, these will not feature on any priority list of the various slates contesting for leadership in Nasrec. Yet, a concerted effort is needed to reduce poverty, inequality and unemployment.
Notably, prominent contenders include Dr Zweli Mkhize and Lindiwe Sisulu, who have changed their minds about supporting Ramaphosa’s second-term bid. It has taken them three years into Ramaphosa’s current term to discover what everyone already knew and what Ramaphosa had blatantly advertised - the dithering from taking tough political decisions on government policy and removing corrupt and divisive individuals from political office.
Yet the majority of prominent contenders have conspicuously failed to support Ramaphosa’s implementation of the stepaside policy at every level of the party in the face of a strong tide of resistance from his detractors.
The president looks like toast, and almost every other story of his success got lost in the noise to wrestle him down — even the one about poor South Africans getting the new R350 social grant.
Ah well, the noise drowning the achievements of Ramaphosa’s first term in office also stems from the ANC’S systemic failure to lead as a collective and curb corruption in government, also repeatedly reported by the auditor-general as billions of rand tipped down the corruption drain.
Ironically, even those contenders who are political heads of government departments are complicit in this corruption.
The end of this five-year ANC show looks disappointing because most faction leaders not ostracised by Ramaphosa have not reciprocated with advancing the country’s interests.
Instead, they spent our taxes to prop up their electoral fortunes and reward bankrollers of their vote-buying schemes with lucrative tenders, including during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Even the carefully choreographed Special Investigating Unit’s probe of Mkhize’s involvement in awarding a communication tender worth R150m to Digital Vibes during the pandemic, leading to his resignation as health minister, is yet another demonstration of the seriousness of the crisis.
It demonstrates that Ramaphosa and his wrecking crew have already smashed our democracy — and they have progressively turned the ire on themselves by even targeting the president for his questionable handling of large sums of his money on his private farm.
Those opportunistic ministers and bag carriers criticising Ramaphosa’s leadership in the name of integrity and unity have instead displayed only their lack of either quality.
They are, as jibed in one national radio breakfast show, “the vultures circling a tick-infested buffalo”.
Meanwhile, instead of capitalising on extra time handed in the previous general elections, many contestants have spent the past few weeks and months not steering the nation to prosperity but plotting the right time to depose their leader and whom they fancy as a replacement.
A vast tableau of national immiseration and slogans for radical economic transformation serves only as the backdrop to their squalid careerism.
It is no secret that all these selfserving leaders have further depreciated the party’s value.
The party’s electoral currency was once pure gold, and now it is the most debased metal in our fledgling democracy. Through their parasitic clinging to government positions while doing no service to the public, today, parents are worried about what they will feed their families as food prices continue rising.
Workers wonder if they will be jobless because of the crippling rolling electricity blackouts and widespread extortion of businesses by criminal syndicates.
School leavers are already in dread of a job-scarce economy and a bleak future that deprives them of their life progression into productive adulthood.
That is why ordinary South Africans who have at one point voted for the ANC to govern will most greatly celebrate the ultimate removal from power of incompetent individuals after this conference.
But the prospects of a weak returning president whom we are not sure has learnt much from handing out plum jobs to individuals with questionable integrity and retaining them even after public exposure is by no means a solution to remove the party’s rot.
Ramaphosa’s shortcomings as ANC leader are the most severe symptoms of a deep crisis in our democracy. He is the leader of this mess, and trailing behind him is the difficult-to-get-rid-ofwrecking crew of shameless leaders who have destroyed much, grabbed what they could and built nothing.
For all his faults, Ramaphosa is also paying the price for years of ANC rule infested by entitlement and greed.
Throughout the years, the corrupt have taken fistfuls and left only small change.
These people are bad at governing because they believe the government is for looting and party renewal is a cute enabling self-enrichment slogan for them.
And when they finally leave one looted office, their only punishment is likely to be a ludicrous diplomatic posting or their pick of state company directorships.
Seeing that some might retain political influence after the conference, we should justifiably insist that SA does not need a repackaged ANC management.
It is crying out for an entirely different form of governance that will invest power and wealth in those deprived for decades.
SA deserves a radically devolved government free from political party dominance and incorporating a robust constituency system as part of a proportional representation of political choices.
It deserves an economic system that values the everyday needs of its people while actively shrinking the influence of the greedy, politically connected elite. And it absolutely must get rid of this wrecking crew in their gravy train. The prospect of ending an era of corrupt individuals clinging to party political power calls for celebrations and, soon thereafter, the actual job of seeing the rest of them everywhere off public office through courts and our votes.