SA’s problem ‘is bigger than ANC or Zuma’
Movement to get rid of president is urged to look at ways to make state more accountable
THE civil society movement to remove President Jacob Zuma also needed to look beyond the ANC, said activists gathered under the banner of the People’s Consultative Assembly in Johannesburg yesterday.
The gathering, one of five across the country, was held to craft a programme of action for Zuma’s removal after the Constitutional Court judgment on the Nkandla scandal. The #ZumaMustGo campaign’s first focus is Freedom Day, April 27, when it will stage events countrywide.
Among the 600 representatives of various movements at the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto campus were former ANC stalwart Ronnie Kasrils, COPE MP Mosiuoa Lekota, United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa, EFF chairman Dali Mpofu and filmmaker Rehad Desai.
Speakers said it was important to recognise that the problem was bigger than Zuma.
“It is about a system that is imperialist . . . a system that is about colonialism, a system that is neoapartheid [and] that is perpetrated by the ANC,” Mpofu said. The notion that a political party could free the people had to be discarded, he said. “The people will free themselves.”
Lekota reiterated COPE’s view that Zuma be removed, the National Assembly dissolved and the proportional representation electoral system replaced with one in which MPs account directly to the people.
“Anyone can see that those men and women in there [parliament] . . . are accountable to some men and women unknown to us. They are accountable to the ANC, or the socalled ANC because that’s not the ANC we know,” Lekota said.
On the sidelines, Holomisa said: “Given that the people of South Africa do not vote directly for their president and the fact that now the ANC is refusing to recall President Zuma, we support the call by civil society to take the matter forward.
“We have presented a tight case in parliament, all parties, but it’s up to the voters now. The ANC must be punished in the next elections.”
In the opening address, the Rev Moss Ntlha, general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance of South Africa, said people had allowed themselves to think that ANC politicians were “our bosses”.
He added: “We must start helping our president to retire to the very expensive complex that we built for him. It is a waste that so much money is not used because he insists on reporting for duty when we no longer require his services.”
In Durban, former Constitutional Court justice Zak Yacoob said: “When we made the constitution — and I was there when we made it — I never thought any elected president will ever steal so much and lie so much.” The problem went beyond the Constitutional Court finding, but he did not think “we have reached a stage where the rot in the head has come right down to the bottom”.
On a call by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa for Zuma to be forgiven, Yacoob said he could only accept the president’s apology if he admitted all the wrongs he had done.
The action plan discussed at the Cape Town meeting includes setting up a “base camp” in The Company’s Garden, and having round-the-clock delegations outside the main gates of the parliamentary complex for the week of April 27 to May 3.
Resembling international “Occupy” events, webcams would broadcast from the 100-tent base camp, and there would be creative activities, screenings of films, and projections of cartoons on to parliament’s walls.
In Langa, Abraham Agulhas, acting chairman of the United Front, told about 120 people: “We know that even if Zuma is removed tomorrow, his replacement by Cyril Ramaphosa, perhaps, or anybody else, is not going to change things fundamentally.
“Whoever is there, the people on the ground must have the power to air their voice or make the changes if they’re not happy with the leadership.”