Leadership can stop the beast

THIS week’s deluge of email revelations shows no signs of abating. It would appear the dam wall that has retained the proof for the flood of conjecture about state capture, particularly by a single family over the office of the president, has finally – irrevocably – been breached.

The findings, thus far, are worse than most of us can imagine, with suggestions a treasure trove of tens of thousands of emails awaits discovery and analysis.

It is an unprecedented state of affairs in South Africa, potentially dwarfing the apartheid-era Infogate scandal, yet there has been little official or unofficial response.

This is dangerous and, ultimately, foolhardy. Sticking your head in the sand – or under the pillow – until danger passes will never work. On the contrary, unanswered and untested allegations have a tendency to morph into fact. No response can also be interpreted as arrogance, with the subjects of the emails showing they are immune to the criticism because the rules they operate by and the ones that govern us are different.

When such a situation occurs, the conditions are ripe for insurrection because the others – those paying for state capture either through tax or fealty or both – feel impotent in the face of such massive and callous insouciance and take the law into their own hands because they feel they have nothing to lose.

We already live atop a tinderbox of anger and seething resentment, evident in the increasingly violent service delivery protests. It takes very little for these to flash over to other protests. Many of us have first-hand knowledge of this from the 1980s and early 1990s. It is a beast that feeds upon itself until it devours us too. The only antidote is proper leadership. Can the real leaders of South Africa please stand up?