Inquiry into state capture needed now

WE ARE living in an era that has neither the benefit of a road map nor of hindsight to let us navigate. Every day we are numbed by more revelations of wrongdoing, and we just call it state capture.

It is all-encompassing, made worse by the lack of effort by those implicated to even deny it.

We are told our state has been captured, we are told by whom, and then we sit back and accept it.

This week, our president went to Parliament, where he was mercilessly heckled in a manner that would be unheard of anywhere else in Africa, but remains testimony to our democratic miracle.

Reports of the event, with few exceptions, didn’t make the front page of newspapers. It is symptomatic of the general malaise affecting all of us. The abnormal has become the new normal.

Just as we became inured to violent crime because it was ubiquitous and we were powerless to make a difference, so we are becoming inured to the incredible tsunami of revelations regarding the president – and the tit-for-tat sniping of jockeying factions within the ruling ANC before the end-ofyear elective conference.

It is a dangerous position to find ourselves in – and it is our leaders who are mostly to blame.

Allegations, whether in leaked emails or not, have to be answered. They have to be addressed – and not by angry denials unsupported by evidence. If they aren’t, we run the real risk of people disengaging from our society and disregarding the very institutions that make us who we are and create the framework of how we live.

The consequences of that kind of apathy are stark and simple – revolution.

We need a judicial commission of inquiry into the allegations of state capture.

The president cannot appoint this commission; he can have no role whatsoever in its composition or its establishment, because he is one of the individuals accused of being central to this entire saga.

We need this commission now, because we might not get another chance later.