Lungisa represents the corruption of SA’s soul
The minor but loud-mouthed ANC politician Andile Lungisa deserves to go to jail, as numerous courts of our republic have found. He deserves to go to jail for far more than deliberately attacking a fellow politician with a jug of water and causing physical harm to him.
He deserves to go to jail and to serve his entire sentence without parole because he embodies the corruption of the soul that SA is enmeshed in today.
You see, Lungisa does not believe that he, like other South Africans, is subject to the laws and conditions of our country. He does not believe that he is like us, ordinary citizens, at all.
Instead, like many ANC politicians, he believes that there is one SA for him and his comrades, and another for the rest of us.
Lungisa and his ilk believe South Africans exist to pay their taxes (which he will squander through initiatives like the notorious “kissing festival” 10 years ago when R100m was spent on a nonsensical extravaganza that he organised), to be told that they should be grateful for being “liberated” by the ANC, and to be stolen from.
It’s not just me saying this. Last week Lungisa told us this himself when he petitioned the Constitutional Court and stated that he should not be thrown behind bars because he “is not suited to the unpalatable food, uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, risk of violence and degrading ablution facilities that come with a prison sentence”.
So who is suited to these terrible conditions? Oh, I see. It’s the ordinary South African. You and me. But not Lungisa and his comrades.
Therein lies the rub. Our politicians believe they should not be exposed to the terrible conditions that their own corruption and poor governance has given us. They deserve better. Indeed, they believe they are better than us.
Think about it. When he was sick, Lungisa’s mentor and hero, former president Jacob Zuma, got on a plane to Russia to get himself treated. Not for him the facilities that ordinary people, the same ones referred to as “the masses of our own people” by the revolutionary ANC, have to bear with. Not for him the facilities in the Eastern Cape where people were reportedly fighting over respirators or sleeping on concrete floors during the Covid-19 pandemic.
No ma’am. That’s for the poor people. For him, please bring in the five-star hotels.
Lungisa is the worst of the horrible faces of the ANC in power. Instead of fixing Eskom, his type would misappropriate public funds, buy themselves a generator and lives in a posh, formerly whites-only suburb.
Instead of fixing the water system, they move to a formerly whites-only suburb and dig themselves a borehole. Instead of eradicating corruption in the police and improving its performance, they move to a formerly whites-only suburb and pay a private security company.
Instead of fixing the roads, they move to a formerly whitesonly suburb while handing crooked government tenders to their friends to build roads that sink within weeks of being built — if they are built at all.
It is doubtful that Lungisa fought against apartheid as he was only 10 years old when Mandela was released from jail in 1990.
Lungisa and his ilk are the first to label those who expose them as “tools of white monopoly capital”, but these champions of black people have no qualms about stealing from and misgoverning the very people they claim to be champions of.
Lungisa and his ilk claim, as he has done, to subsist on milk and pap. Now he says he can’t eat it in prison. Who should eat it?
At the heart of all this is the question: Who does SA belong to?
It belongs to all of us, I thought. That’s why we have to make it work.
Lungisa and his loud cohort of the corrupt and corrupted don’t think so. In Lungisa’s world the real SA, the one where there is hunger and deprivation and squalor, belongs to the poor, the weak, the vulnerable.
In his world they are the ones who have to use our broken hospitals, our dirty water, our terrible roads - and send their children to schools where they may die from falling into a pit latrine.
This is 2020. If we can’t see people like Lungisa for the charlatans they are then we are in huge trouble.
Thankfully Lungisa has no qualms about telling us who he and his comrades really are. They are naked before our very eyes. These are the looters.
Lungisa and his ilk are the first to label those who expose them as ‘tools of white monopoly capital’, but have no qualms about misgoverning the very people they claim to be champions of