Oops! Another couple of ANC ‘mistakes’
IT’S the kind of plea a helpless father might in a different, more servile era, have written to his daughter’s abusive spouse.
In essence, it beseeches the cad not to abuse the battered woman whom he professes to love.
Despite the high hopes expressed in the heartfelt entreaty, the tone is resigned. The writer is going through the motions, expecting to be disappointed, yet again. There’s no agency here, just the stench of disempowerment.
What I’m talking about is the plea that the eponymous Ahmed Kathrada Foundation – named after the ANC anti-apartheid activist and which strives to advance good governance – issued last week on the occasion of the KwaZuluNatal floods. It is addressed to the government the foundation supports and, as is proper for a supplicant, the foundation remembers to say “please”.
“Please do not repeat the Covid19 experience – don’t steal,” is the headline. It writes that South Africans must learn from Covid.
“Let us use the rebuilding programme to start a new process of transparent, cost-effective and participatory governance. ‘Trust is earned’ … and this is an opportunity for the government to start earning it by doing what is in the interest of the people and not for the bank accounts of a few.”
The plaintive sentiments have since been echoed by others within the governing tripartite alliance, by scores of opposition figures, and by thousands of ordinary South Africans on social media. We all say pretty much the same thing the Kathrada Foundation is saying, without for a moment reflecting how outlandishly inappropriate it is that a nation’s inhabitants have to go onto their knees and beg their government not to steal their money.
This is not appropriate behaviour in a modern democracy. This is feudalism, serfdom in anything but name.
Anywhere else in the world, there would be an angry kickback. The scum would be out on their taxpayer-padded backsides at the very next election.
Instead, in South Africa, we touch our forelocks, bob our heads, and wait for Jesus to arrive. We grovel and beg ANC politicians and officials to behave like human beings. What’s wrong with us?
It’s not as if the ANC fat cats are listening. The moment the KZN emergency relief started flowing, the cadres had their piggy snouts in the trough.
No sooner had an enormous stock of donated foodstuffs and clothing been assembled at Durban’s Virginia Airport by civil society, than eThekwini municipal officials pitched up in trucks and bakkies bearing NMD registration plates, to load them up for “delivery”.
Vanessa Wright, the chair of the local ratepayers’ association, who was co-ordinating the distribution, had to park her car in front of the municipal convoy to prevent the unasked-for assistance.
After initially insisting that everything was kosher, it had to eventually concede that it was “a mistake” to have tried to spirit off the supplies. Oops!
Just two days earlier, announcing that R1 billion had been set aside by the province for flood relief, KZN Premier Sihle Zikalala had said that the ANC had “learnt a lot” from the looting of Covid relief funds. This time, “no amount of corruption, maladministration or fraud will be tolerated”.
The next day, with water supplies cut off in much of the province, Zikalala summoned a home delivery, a whole water tanker just for the use of his family.
When the video went viral, Zikalala at first claimed that it was contemptuous slander and that the footage had been digitally manipulated.
Only when the testimony of his neighbours became incontestable did he come clean.
It was “a mistake”, apologised Zikalala and it will “never happen again”.
Oops!
None of this is surprising in the slightest. More than two years ago, announcing that billions of private, international and taxpayer money would be made available for Covid relief, President Cyril Ramaphosa tried to forestall public cynicism with the promise that “not a cent” would be stolen.
He was right. It was not small change but billions that was stolen.
What organisations like the Kathrada Foundation are achieving with their well-meaning but effete interventions is the opposite of what they intend. By pandering to the ANC, they are not advancing democracy but retarding it.
The so-called “reformist” ANC is a myth. Ramaphosa’s reformists may be stealing at a more pedestrian pace than the Zuma cabal, but that is all.
A government exists to deliver public goods. A Mafia exists to thieve the public’s goods. It’s not difficult to see which one the ANC is best at.
It is clear from the degree of public scorn that greeted Ramaphosa’s and Zikalala’s promises on emergency flood relief that no one believes a word they say.
That’s a dangerous position for a political party, and a country, to be in.