Morally bankrupt maul the upright

THE ANC, once a proud, clear-eyed and capable organisation, cannot come up with the solutions that SA needs to get itself out of the massive problems we face.

The battle to build a prosperous, united and non-racial South Africa cannot be delivered by the ANC. It is up to South Africans.

There are many serious people who were at the ANC’s national policy conference last week who will tell you just what a disaster the whole thing was. The party – faced with a 27.7% unemployment rate, junk status, a technical recession, racial polarisation, increasing protests and, crucially, a corrupt and incompetent president in thrall to the criminal Gupta mafia family – emerged after six days of talks without a single coherent policy to revive the economy. Or any other coherent programme on any issue except a nonsensical call for the nationalisation of the Reserve Bank.

Despite this gargantuan failure, even the “good guy” in this ANC firefight, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, continued to delude himself.

Ramaphosa told a gala dinner on Friday evening that the ANC had emerged from its recent national policy conference with renewed vigour and a clear message that it was now time to get back work and attend to the business of building a non-racial‚ non-sexist‚ just and prosperous society.

One imagines that Ramaphosa has to say all these things even if he does not believe them. He is, after all, locked into the ANC’s mode of campaigning. This is to criticise without seeming to criticise, to defend the party while making only sly references to the corruption of its leader and his divided cabinet.

But if you think that what transpired at the ANC policy conference – the lack of clear policy, the race-baiting of the likes of Pravin Gordhan and Derek Hanekom, the attempts to humiliate serious thinkers like Joel Netshitenzhe - is depressing then consider what the party did immediately afterwards.

ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu announced on Friday that he wanted the party to take action against ANC MP Makhosi Khoza.

Khoza’s transgression?

She has written to National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete asking for MPs to be given space to vote with their conscience on a motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma scheduled for August 8th.

Now, how does one begin to even understand what’s going on here?

Zuma has been asked by the ANC’s integrity commission, made up of the party’s great and good, to step down for his many peccadilloes and indiscretions. He has been found to have failed to uphold and defend his oath of office by the Constitutional Court.

His friend Schabir Shaik was convicted and jailed for bribing him. He is dodging the law on 783 counts of fraud, corruption and racketeering. He has slept with the daughter of his friend who claimed she raped him. He sleeps soundly in a R246-million house built fraudulently for him by taxpayers.

I have not even started on his shocking relationship with the dodgy Gupta family. That is a whole five-volume book on its own.

The ANC is choosing to charge Khoza not, by the way, for standing up against this man but for choosing to follow what the Constitutional Court has already ruled on.

In its wisdom, the ConCourt said: “Members are required to swear or affirm faithfulness to the Republic and obedience to the Constitution and laws. Nowhere does the supreme law provide for them to swear allegiance to their political parties, important players though they are in our constitutional scheme.”

I am a firm believer in political parties. I believe that they have rights – such as to take firm positions on certain issues – and to enforce those rights among members. They also have responsibilities.

The ANC has been irresponsible for ten years now through its failure to rein in and discipline Jacob Zuma, a man who has sold his organisation and the country to the Gupta family to such an extent that they choose cabinet ministers and run much of the country.

Those still with a backbone – the Khozas, Gordhans, Mcebisi Jonases of the world – are doing their best to hold Zuma to account. But they are being mauled by the ANC.

And the few, like Mthembu, who have spoken out in the past then go on to aid and abet Zuma by being his bull terrier when the likes of Khoza speak up.

They say evil happens when the good stay silent. Evil flourishes when the few good men and women, such as Mthembu and even Police Minister Fikile Mbalula, aid and abet a horrendously inadequate and destructive force like Zuma.

It is telling that over the past year - when the ANC Youth League in KwaZulu-Natal published Khoza’s address and details on social media and threatened her – the police neither offered her bodyguards or any kind of security.

We are here now. We are on our own. The ANC, once a force for good, is a gang that works merely to protect its leader, Zuma.

The solutions to South Africa’s problems will not come from the ANC. The party will not and cannot “self-correct”. It is on its way to implosion. The solutions must come from civil society.