Forgetting God has left ANC wanting as the MK logo debacle shows
Complacency is behind the regress that marks the once upstanding liberation movement
Nobel prize-winning author and poet Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. Wondering how the once mighty USSR could have come to such ruin in the early part of the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn, a wordsmith and man of letters, was at a loss... for words.
He had to rely on the sagacity of Russian elders for most apt explanation for the “great disasters that had befallen Russia”.
“Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
A wave of atheism and selfdestructions was sweeping through Russia at the time, culminating in the “ruinous Russian Revolution” that Solzhenitsyn lamented had “swallowed up some 60million of our people”.
Inside the broad church that is the ANC, “forgetting God” can never be determined as being at the core of the trials and tribulations of the once glorious movement.
Perchance there is another practice that is at the root of the disembowelment of the ANC – self-inflicted as it is. It could be complacency, the malady of the arrogant and the big-headed, a trait that is as ANC as the green, black and gold colours on its mast.
In his poignant lament of the fall of the Mother Russia, Solzhenitsyn invokes the wisdom of compatriot and novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
“Dostoevsky warned that great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.”
In the very next line, he writes: “That is precisely what has happened.”
He could be talking about the ANC today.
In the early years of his presidency, Nelson Mandela was engaged in a bitter legal fight to reclaim ownership of his prison number 46664. Mandela had a fight on his hands to trademark his own “property” so he alone could benefit commercially from it.
Mandela had to seek the protection of the courts to stop long-time confidante and lawyer Ismail Ayob from selling artworks of the likeness of Madiba. The falling out was messy, to put it mildly.
Now, you’d be forgiven to think there’d be institutional memory at Luthuli House. You’d swear the ANC would be ready to fight and not be caught intellectually unprepared.
But the ANC are proving to be masters at “forgetting God”, being complacent. The entitlement that comes with incumbency has gone to its collective head. It “liberated” the previously disadvantaged masses of SA, so take it for granted that “our people” will vote it into power election after election. But, alas, the polls have proved this to be an illusion, delusions of grandeur. Numbers show ANC support has dwindled.
These great events that are catching the ANC unprepared could have been foreseen, and avoided.
On Sunday June 5 1955, about 3,000 people gathered in Kliptown, Soweto, to adopt the ANC Bible, the Freedom Charter, in what would later be widely known as the “congress of the people”. The phrase is as ANC as the swoosh strike of Nike or the three stripes of Adidas.
But in December 2008, after the former ANC strongman Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota had served divorce papers on the party, the courts decided his new outfit could call itself the Congress of the People (Cope).
Towards the end of last year, Luthuli House was aware that its erstwhile Number 1, Jacob Zuma, was hard at work setting up a counter political home for the walking wounded, the aggrieved in the ANC ranks.
The party dug its head in the sand, hoping to call Zuma’s plan a bluff. Now shaken out of its reverie, it approached the Electoral Court to stop the registration of Zuma’s MK Party. Too late, the court said, throwing the book at the ANC. Your case holds no water, it was chided in court on Tuesday. MK is as ANC as the colours of its logo.
Now the Umkhonto weSizwe logo is gone. Why? Because the men and women in the ANC have grown haughty and “forgotten God.” That is why all this has happened.