ANC through the eye of the needle ...

Party needs more than lifestyle audits – it needs to examine the grasping, flashy vulgarity of many in its ranks

MUCHhas been said about the ANC national general council resolution calling for lifestyle audits for public servants and in business.

What this amounts to is no more than promoting the idea of searching the pockets of those who we think might be thieves without dealing with why they feel the need to steal.

I am not suggesting there is ever a good reason to steal. But a hungry person left to guard the bakery will make for the worst possible security guard.

By emphasising the passing of the test, and not a clean life, the ANC is like a sports coach who tells his charges to ensure not to be caught doping instead of helping them find ways of being better at their game.

The ANC must acknowledge that its leaders over the years have cultivated the culture that has aided and abetted the flourishing of a lifestyle that now requires to be audited.

By attending to audits and the culture that promotes corruption and pillaging of state resources, the party is merely dealing with the symptoms.

When the president says it is cold outside of the ANC or that if you want your business to succeed you must link up with the ANC, he is creating or encouraging a culture that is, in the long run, bad for the values of our society.

Every year, billions of rands of state money are misspent or not accounted for – longhand for stolen – yet we remain with very low (if any) numbers of those convicted for flouting the Public Finance Management Act.

Obviously not everyone who works in the public service is an ANC member or supporter, but since they work for an ANC-led government, corruption, fraud and theft from the state coffers reflects on the governing party, and correctly so.

With talk in some circles that councillors should earn the same as MPs, you can expect that there will be more bloodletting as comrades vie for office and the material comforts it brings.

The ANC must get tough on its own members – such as Northern Cape chairman John Block, who stands accused of fraud, corruption and money laundering, for allegedly accepting kickbacks from a property developer leasing buildings to the provincial government.

Unless it does, talk of lifestyle audits is mere lip service. It gets worse when Block has continued in his role as MEC for finance despite his being charged with having his hand in the cookie jar.

Even if Block is acquitted, it will serve the party to be introspective and ask itself some uncomfortable questions about how its own leaders project leadership as meaning living a life of caviar and Champagne.

One can tell that the ANC is in town by the number of its members gathering at some of the most posh drinking spaces in town and consuming the finest beverages. In some cases, this is accompanied by the most shameless objectifying of young women who are paraded as mere trophies on the arm of a man who considers himself as having arrived.

Instead of lifestyle audits, or perhaps together with them, the ANC should encourage its members to reflect on how they, as society leaders with apparent reverence for material possessions, promote the wrong ideas about what leadership means.

The party must make frugality fashionable and stigmatise the vulgar flashing of cash, no matter how it was acquired.

There is a tendency by ANC supporters to pretend that anyone calling

The party must make frugality fashionable and stigmatise the vulgar flashing of cash

for financial prudence and frugality is in reality calling for government officials to live in sub-standard accommodation or drive rickety old jalopies fit to take university students to campus or the nearest drinking place.

They must remind members and leaders that the ANC’s 2001 document, “Through the Eye of the Needle”, which comes from the biblical story about a rich man who was so attached to his material wealth that Jesus told him it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for the rich to enter heaven.

If the ANC wants its leaders to “go through the eye of the needle”, so to speak, it will require that they do more than just pass a lifestyle audit.

Passing an audit does not necessarily mean that the suspected deed has not been done. It may very well mean that their paper trail and alibis check out. It is no secret that there are many who have joined the ANC with the sole intention of enriching themselves.

Since the ANC has voluntarily chosen the phrase as a rallying cry, it might as well go ahead and have a discussion with its members about the attachment to worldly goods and how this affects the quality of the party and its capacity to deliver on the popular mandate it has.