Use vote to make SA foolproof

There are those who would dismiss former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke’s latest jibe at ex-president Jacob Zuma as a case of sour grapes.

After all, Zuma did overlook Moseneke twice for the post of chief justice when it was clear to all that the ex-Robben Islander was the best jurist for the job.

Others may even point out that Moseneke never thought highly of Zuma and would remind us of the statements he allegedly made at a party in Durban, just days after the ANC elected the latter as its president in December 2007.

All of this may be true, but it does not take away the central point of Moseneke’s statement during his Wits University speech on Wednesday.

In case you missed it, Moseneke told his audience that:

“For the last 10 years, we all lost the guts to tell a bumbling fool, who was sitting out there acting as a president, and tell him he is a fool; and tell him he is incapable of {meeting] the high ideals of our liberation Struggle.

“And as we failed to do that, we actually allowed so much devastation and poor people became poorer, and the few people who were more adept at stealing appeared to be important... We must ask how did we get there.”

For us the issue is not really that Moseneke called a former head of state a “bumbling fool”, but that he points out that the devastation of the past decade – what ANC veteran Ngoako Ramatlhodi this week called “years of madness” would not have been possible without our consent as a people.

For two terms, too many of us kept silent as Zuma and his collaborators went about weakening and destroying institutions of state and undermining the constitution.

It is well and good to blame the political party that gave us that kind of a president; we can even point fingers at individual politicians who actively campaigned for Zuma’s ascendency to power when it was clear that he was not suitable for high office.

But the one truth we cannot shy away is that in two successive general elections, despite overwhelming evidence showing that Zuma was bad news, the vast majority of us voters still put our Xs next to his face.

That is how we got here. The challenge is to make sure we never elect a “bumbling fool” again.