ANC HAS TERMINAL SYMPTOMS

The ANC seems to be spending an awful lot of time and energy on errant, corrupt leaders who are desperately clinging to it as a vehicle for their crimes. Instead, the government it runs should be focusing on rolling out vaccines to ensure that SA can get on top of the Covid pandemic and rejoin the global community.

Bloomberg estimates that at the pace of our current vaccination programme, we will only reach the required level of immunity in a decade.

For the governing party, in an election year, in a country with a limping economy, ending the pandemic through securing vaccines should have been the primary focus — but it was not. One wonders if the cabinet is hiding in its ranks anti-vaxxers who have sabotaged attempts to secure vaccines from the start.

Since the middle of last year the party’s attention has been elsewhere — on its errant secretary-general Ace Magashule and former president Jacob Zuma, who are constantly urinating on the constitution.

Zuma’s umpteenth declaration of victimhood, leaked widely over the weekend in the form of his comments at a meeting with the ANC top six, was — coupled with reports that Magashule’s supporters want to “shut down” the country — a sad indictment of the governing party. Zuma told the top six he no longer believed a constitutional democracy was the correct path, that the judiciary had become too powerful and had targeted him, that the ANC had hung him out to dry and that he felt wronged by having to pay back R8m for the upgrades to his Nkandla residence.

It would be laughable if it were not so tragic. How many more ANC leaders no longer believe in our constitution or the rule of law?

Zuma compared the Nkandla upgrades with those carried out for other former presidents, omitting to mention that in his case they were for his personal benefit — a swimming pool, amphitheatre and cattle kraal hardly count as justified security measures.

But Zuma’s brand of reality was always twisted and warped. Who can forget his demand that he be given time to “introduce” President Cyril Ramaphosa to ANC structures, the AU and the Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and SA) before he resigned in 2018 — after Ramaphosa had been deputy president and leader of government business since 2012 and a longserving member of the ANC national executive committee. That despicable individuals such as these continue to have influence shows in exactly whose interests the party is governing — and it is not in the interests of citizens.

Even in the face of electoral decline, the ANC’s fixation remains on solidarity with those who have made a mockery of the rule of law and used the organisation to further the material ambitions of their friends and families by destroying key institutions — which are still buckling as a result.

Zuma’s tenure as president led to the ANC’s electoral support declining from a high of a two-thirds majority under Thabo Mbeki in 2004 to a low of just 57.5% in 2019. The party should be working to turn its fortunes around ahead of the local government elections after the bloodbath in 2016, when it lost three key cities and fell below 50% support in former strongholds such as Ekurhuleni.

The ANC is a tired organisation that has lost touch with its constituency and is now so inward looking that it cannot see the reckoning with the electorate that looms in its future. While it will probably avoid a complete loss of power in the upcoming elections — due mainly to the equally pathetic state of the opposition parties — it is heading steadily towards the inevitable. The likes of Zuma and Magashule might welcome this, because they appear intent on dragging the entire party down with them.

That despicable individuals still have influence shows in whose interests the party governs