This is the Republic of Guptazania

THE SIGNBOARD on the Zimbabwean side of Beit Bridge could read, “Welcome. You are now entering the Republic of Guptazania”.

How did we let this come about? Ruminating over a cup of tea, as I studied the litany of crime and corruption exploding out of Jacques Pauw’s The President’s Keepers, I recall the statement that after former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s damning report into Nkandla-gate about which President Jacob Zuma protests his ignorance, alternatively his innocence, about, referred to South Africa as a “Mafia state”.

The Sunday Times did what other Sunday newspapers didn’t have the guts to do, namely publish on its front page as well as editorialise about where we are right now as a nation. Again I ask, how did we, (this is no mistype), yes we, let this happen?

Rewind to Polokwane and the euphoria that we regaled in after the Cosatu led regime change that saw the ouster of a philosopher president.

He reigned from the rarefied atmosphere far removed from the reality of HIV/Aids driven by poverty in favour of our home boy (with apologies to Ronnie Kasrils).

As a former shepherd, he was punted as a prophet who would lead us across the sea to the promised land. How could we silently let this degenerate to the hell that closely approximates what Dante Alleghieri described in The Inferno?

Fast forward to 2017 and to Pauw’s explosive book that the SA Revenue Service is so desperate to suppress with its “cease and desist” threat.

Anyone who has read his earlier book In the Heart of the Whore which exposed during the apartheid era about death squads under convicted apartheid commander Eugene de Kock, yes Mr Prime Evil himself, which operated with impunity, will know that this is no figment of a retired journalist’s imagination.

These very evil people who blended into the stream of post-apartheid South Africa became tools in the hands of ruthless gangster types very much reminiscent of many South American countries who have reduced our beloved Mzansi to ashes.

Despair not, for we can rise like the phoenix from the ashes but we need to act. SABER AHMED JAZBHAY

Newlands West