ANC’s attitude will be nail in the coffin

Once upon a time, the ANC and its leaders would gaze into the coming Red Dawn, looking forward to the day when socialism and communism would consign capitalism to the dustbin of history… and the newly liberated masses of South Africa would build bronze and marble statues in their honour.

It was an alluring dream and the fact that it was built on millions of deaths in the Soviet Union alone – when Stalin purged and purified his people – mattered little to the ANC apparatchiks: you can’t make a left-wing omelette without breaking a few recalcitrant free market eggs, can you?

When the Soviet Union fell in 1989/90, even an ardent Communist like Joe Slovo was motivated to ask: is socialism dead? Socialism, Soviet-style, was never alive in the first place, replaced by an iron-fisted military dictatorship.

The ANC has been unable to let go of that utopian dream of 40 or more years ago, notwithstanding that the world has probably changed more in the past 35 years than at any other time in history.

Childish loyalty to the “Revolution” persists to this day in the use by the ANC of the word “comrade” – and now, the blind backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine.

Of course, the ANC has every right to go back to 1985… but it must not expect that this will not have repercussions for this country. The silly attempt to get regard as a “mediator” in the Ukraine conflict is a case in point.

A mediator does not speak only to one side in a conflict, still less parrot that side’s justifications – which is something President Cyril Ramaphosa has done with Putin.

The ANC’s attitude will be the nail in the coffin of international respectability for South Africa. It is clear we are nothing more than a Russian client state.