Guptas are SA’s unelected leaders
EVERY five years, millions of South Africans queue outside polling stations to vote for their preferred party to represent them in parliament. The right to vote is a fundamental one enshrined in the country’s constitution. It is the product of many decades of painful struggle in which generations of South Africans shed tears and blood.
The MPs who are elected in this process then, at their first sitting, elect the country’s president.
It is the duty of the president to uphold, defend and respect the constitution. In its preamble, the constitution declares that it lays the foundation for a democratic society in which “government is based on the will of the people”.
Yet in Jacob Zuma we have a president who appears not only to have abdicated his executive authority to unelected private individuals who happen to be his personal friends, but who has also compromised the sovereignty of the republic.
The revelation of e-mail correspondence between cabinet ministers, directors of parastatals, Zuma’s son Duduzane and individuals linked to the Gupta family and their companies is but the latest in a series of exposés that show the extent to which our leaders have made a mockery of our democratic system.
What the e-mails reveal is that the public representatives who we, the citizens, elect on election day, are not in charge. Instead, the people who call the shots are private individuals who use their proximity to the president and his son to run the country without being accountable to anyone.
As we publish this edition, the ANC’s top leadership body — the national executive committee — is locked in an important meeting in which, once again, a number of its members are going to call for Zuma to step down.
Past attempts within the party to achieve this have failed because Zuma has long foreseen the possibility of a revolt and packed the NEC with his loyalists.
He survived the damning Constitutional Court ruling on Nkandla, sensational revelations that the Guptas were appointing cabinet ministers for him, and a long list of other scandals, precisely because most of the NEC is in his pocket.
Although his opponents went to this weekend’s NEC meeting saying they had never felt stronger, few would be surprised if he survives the guillotine again.
However, for purely selfish reasons — if the interests of the country no longer matter to the ANC — the party’s top leaders should be asking themselves how long they can sustain this. Even their party, by far the largest in South Africa, can no longer be called a “governing party” or a “ruling party” without people wondering if the real ruling party is not actually based somewhere in Saxonwold.
The only description that seems to fit the ANC nowadays is “majority party”. Even that cannot be guaranteed beyond 2019, especially if the party insists on protecting a president who has shown extreme loyalty to his friends and family, but total disdain for our country’s constitution, for its people and for democracy in general.