The beautiful ones are silenced

“THE man” referred to in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born I know does exist, but he has been silenced by fear and a sense of hopelessness that a political party that assumed the mantle of liberating SA from poverty and dispossession acts as if corruption, greed and gluttony are minor irritations.

I refer to Nkosana Sibuyi’s “A challenge to end era of unchecked corruption” (Tribune, May 13) with the rider that the beautiful ones Armah refers to have been born but they subsist in a cocoon nourished by the ruling elite, and like apartheid’s acolytes wouldn’t dare break out and experience the extreme hardship and disempowerment that 93 percent of their fellow South Africans experience. It is this nurtured yuppie class that, in my mind, serves the corrupt and greedy through apathy.

Warning signals of the approaching tsunami have been given but the ANC is going about things as if it is its divine right to govern SA. The “beautiful ones” like the Rev Frank Chicane, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and Moeletsi Mbeki have made their thoughts well known and yet why is it that the African renaissance has not rid us of the rot of corruption?

We don’t need an Arab Spring but a ruthless yet politically clean leadership to drive a movement to sweep away the corrupt and the incompetent the Zuma administration keeps placing in key positions.

As Moeletsi Mbeki pointed out recently, politically SA is unstable and I get the sense that at the thrust of his argument lies embedded crime and corruption.

For every corrupter there is a corruptee – one cannot subsist without the other. The bond must be severed and it has to be done at every level. It starts with every righteous patriot refusing to have dealings with the corrupt.

SABER AHMED JAZBHAY

Durban