SA politics needs a Reformation moment
ONE OF the most often-heard comments about the ANC is incomprehension at the loyalty it continues to command.
“When will the scales drop from the eyes of the true believers? When will ANC voters vote with their minds and not their hearts?” goes the refrain. But the ANC’s critics here make the mistake of conflating two distinct groups: ANC true believers and ANC voters.
ANC voters have indeed deserted the party. This is reflected in the party’s sagging turnout numbers.
ANC true believers, like the supporters of any strongly ideologically based movement, find it difficult to walk away. Their identities are so tied to the cause they embraced so fervently for so long, often at a great personal sacrifice, that to sever ties is inconceivable.
There are other costs, too.
The ANC does not accept lightly anything less than the unswerving faith of its prominent members.
Apostasy, although not punished by death – as it was in early Christianity – nevertheless comes at a price. Those who won’t obey unquestioningly, who publicly doubt party edicts, or think that the Constitution carries a greater moral and legal weight than that of the party, get short shrift.
That the costs can be incredibly high are made clear in two recent books by ANC stalwarts. Both Themba Maseko, the former head of the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS), and Ivan Pillay, a former top official in the SA Revenue Service (Sars), tell harrowing tales of the personal and professional costs that political excommunication entails.
In For My Country, Themba Maseko traces his lifelong commitment to the party until he made the mistake of refusing to facilitate the state looting of Zuma and his cronies, the Gupta clan.
The Unlikely Mr Rogue recounts, through the eyes of his wife, antiapartheid activist Evelyn Groenink, Pillay’s commitment to the ANC from boyhood to eventually helping set up the world-class compliance systems that made Sars virtually the only institutional bulwark against the rape of the state coffers during the Zuma years.
Whether or not one supports the ANC, the trajectories of the two men are emotionally searing. Stripped of ideology and doctrine, it’s about an aeons-old dilemma: What do good people do when the powerful movements that they cherish and depend on for their daily bread demand that they do bad things?
Maseko, who was the first in his family to complete high school, joined the Struggle at 13 years of age and operated as an underground activist during his school and university years.
In 2006, Maseko was made chief executive of GCIS and the following year he was, with a giggle and a metaphorically arched eyebrow, despatched by Zuma to the Gupta’s compound. When he refused instructions to divert the government’s entire advertising budget to the family’s media company, he was removed from his position and forced to leave the public service.
Maseko struggled after being forced out of GCIS. “I became a professional, political and social leper,” he writes, “shunned by friends and enemies alike.”
Pillay’s alienation traces a similar path. His inconveniently efficient, even-handed approach to top-level ANC corruption while at Sars made him the target of a massive smear.
He was falsely identified as running, with his top colleagues, a criminal “rogue unit”. They were forced out of Sars and it took them years to clear their names.
Maseko says that although no longer a card-carrying member, he will always love the ANC. Pillay also appears to be a true believer.
Groenink writes that although the values embodied in the ANC’s lodestar elders are gone, “perhaps the North Star can be dusted off. It may be a bit grimy but it has not disappeared. So many comrades… carry on simply because it is there”.
It is clear from Pillay’s and Maseko’s sentimentality over the ANC that leaving the ideological home of a lifetime is not easy. That’s one of the reasons for our political logjam.
South Africa needs the political equivalent of the Reformation that changed Christianity. It needs a Luther-like figure who, instead of fawning over the presidential signet ring, will nail an alternative vision to the Luthuli House door.