I REFER to the article “Why Nkandla is our daily bread” (SD, April 5) by one Xolile Nqatha, the provincial secretary of the SACP.
It seems he is lost in a sea of confusion as to what communism really means. At the time when it is difficult to pinpoint good governance and leadership, and ethics are in the news headlines for the wrong reasons, I regard it as unpalatable, even shameful for a person who calls himself a communist not to pose the vexing question, “In the face of a disappearing moral compass, where is our sense of humanity that we were deprived of by the apartheid years? To what extent has it been restored by freedom?”
This is the question that cries out for an honest answer before the celebration of our 20 years of freedom which we will mark at the end of this month.
In South Africa today the so-called communists do not seem capable of comprehending these matters. They are mired in little cat fights with insignificant political players.
If you were to ask – “Who are the leading leftist thinkers of South Africa?” – you could cannot avoid the reality that we are in an intellectual desert. Those who claim to be thinkers, including the master squealer, Blade Nzimande, have not written a single book that would justify their hollow claims.
In post-apartheid South Africa, most communists who have had the opportunity to occupy positions of power in the state (and in the private sector) have essentially committed class suicide.
In fact, to even suggest our breed of “communists” are anywhere near being “philosophers” or “intellectuals”, would be to abuse the meaning of these historical concepts.
Beyond empty slogans and hollow shibboleths, very few of our communists have woven a cogent argument on communism. Since Joe Slovo authored Has Socialism Failed? in 1990, no communist in South Africa has written anything of note that would be taken seriously on the international socialist platform.
Simply put, our latter-day communists cannot think; they lack the intellectual sharpness that is traditionally associated with leftist thinkers. If you were to ask communists in South Africa to convince Karl Popper that marxism is a science – not a dogma, you would struggle to extract any coherence from their attempted response.
Our so-called communists do not have the capacity to distinguish pseudo-science from science. We hear communists using the concept “motive force” without understanding its technical meaning or its origins.
This term is borrowed from Newton, who used it to obtain a comparative measure of forces and quantify force in his early mechanics. To use the term the way communists in South Africa apply it is to suggest that society operates in the same dynamic as mechanics, which is indeed wrong.
These communists of the 21st century continue to adhere to the creed of marxism as if nothing has changed since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto on February 21 1848. (Hence their ideological creed is surpassed by their material greed).
We live in a period characterised by political noise. What misleads us into thinking there is still a contest of ideas, is the fact that when South Africa jumped into its current political desert, we did so carrying a bag of old slogans that we used to toy with under apartheid.
It is not uncommon in our time to hear a political novice say “revolution” without explaining what they understand by it. Nor is it unusual for political clowns to call themselves champions of the left, without telling us more about the content of their leftism.
Louis Althusser’s observation about pseudo-marxists is indeed relevant to our intellectual desert: “If you take communist philosophers and other communist ‘intellectuals’ and set them officially on a bourgeois ideological and philosophical line in order to ‘criticise’ a regime under which they have suffered deeply, you must not be surprised when the same communists philosophers and intellectuals quite naturally take the road of bourgeois philosophy.”
Here in his article we see Nqatha trying to manage, tame, deflect and douse the flames from the public protector’s report, but his is a sorry attempt to pay his dues in booking a cabinet position.
To qualify to be the vanguard, a communist party must have a revolutionary theory, programme, organisation and strategy. It would have been strategic for the SACP to advise the ANC to stop trying to “manage” the Nkandla report and start to take full ownership of its authorship.
The SACP must make it clear to the ANC that the office of the public protector may be the author of “Secure in Comfort”, but neither that office nor Advocate Thuli Madonsela is the author of the Nkandla scandal.
This is a story authored by the ANC government. At the heart of the story’s plot are key government officials and prominent ANC leaders – none more prominent than the president of the party and the country.
Luthuli House and the Union Buildings should rise to the occasion and take responsibility, not some responsibility, but full responsibility.
Responsibility should not only be for aspects of the Nkandla saga, but for everything about it, especially for originating the very idea of extensive “security improvements” for the private home of a sitting president and for allowing, if not nurturing, the culture and environment where such an idea could emerge and be appropriated so greedily, so improperly and so unethically.
The Presidency, the president and his entire executive should assume collective responsibility for all that went wrong in Nkandla under their watch. The ANC is probably concerned about votes at this time, but taking responsibility for what goes wrong under one’s watch is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength.
At the heart of the public protector’s finding is a huge failure of governance, serious deviations from ethical conduct, and a failure of leadership and oversight.
The ANC should stop being anxious about the possible impact of the report on their election performance.
They should own up to the mess that is Nkandla and approach the South African voter with humility and with the truth.
The voter, especially the loyal ANC voter, will respect the ANC more and not less if the ANC was to say: “We have messed up, we understand the implications of our failure in leadership, we are determined to fix the mess and here is how we are going to do it”.
The ANC should always be reminded that its place in the hearts of millions of South Africans is owed to the history of conducting a moral and ethical struggle largely through moral and ethical means.
The “power” of the ANC derives from the “negotiated revolution” it waged, as well as the reconciliation ideology on which its ascendancy to power was premised. In the light of this, the ANC should use Nkandla to regain its moral stature. The way to do this is to accept full responsibility for Nkandla.
The Nkandla story may not look like a good story to tell, but it is an important story for the ANC to take heed of.
Let the ANC use this debacle to speak truth to itself, to its president and the people of South Africa. Let it form the pole around which it will build a huge anti-corruption plan. Speaking the truth is the least South Africans expect of the ANC. In so doing, a message will have been unequivocally sent to our pseudo-communists that a shrewd politician should recognise when a band-wagon is turning to a tumbril.
Xolani Trevor Somaca is SANCO BCM’s RTT convenor
Nqatha clearly confused
It seems he is lost in a sea of confusion as to what communism really means. At the time when it is difficult to pinpoint good governance and leadership, and ethics are in the news headlines for the wrong reasons, I regard it as unpalatable, even shameful for a person who calls himself a communist not to pose the vexing question, “In the face of a disappearing moral compass, where is our sense of humanity that we were deprived of by the apartheid years? To what extent has it been restored by freedom?”
This is the question that cries out for an honest answer before the celebration of our 20 years of freedom which we will mark at the end of this month.
In South Africa today the so-called communists do not seem capable of comprehending these matters. They are mired in little cat fights with insignificant political players.
If you were to ask – “Who are the leading leftist thinkers of South Africa?” – you could cannot avoid the reality that we are in an intellectual desert. Those who claim to be thinkers, including the master squealer, Blade Nzimande, have not written a single book that would justify their hollow claims.
In post-apartheid South Africa, most communists who have had the opportunity to occupy positions of power in the state (and in the private sector) have essentially committed class suicide.
In fact, to even suggest our breed of “communists” are anywhere near being “philosophers” or “intellectuals”, would be to abuse the meaning of these historical concepts.
Beyond empty slogans and hollow shibboleths, very few of our communists have woven a cogent argument on communism. Since Joe Slovo authored Has Socialism Failed? in 1990, no communist in South Africa has written anything of note that would be taken seriously on the international socialist platform.
Simply put, our latter-day communists cannot think; they lack the intellectual sharpness that is traditionally associated with leftist thinkers. If you were to ask communists in South Africa to convince Karl Popper that marxism is a science – not a dogma, you would struggle to extract any coherence from their attempted response.
Our so-called communists do not have the capacity to distinguish pseudo-science from science. We hear communists using the concept “motive force” without understanding its technical meaning or its origins.
This term is borrowed from Newton, who used it to obtain a comparative measure of forces and quantify force in his early mechanics. To use the term the way communists in South Africa apply it is to suggest that society operates in the same dynamic as mechanics, which is indeed wrong.
These communists of the 21st century continue to adhere to the creed of marxism as if nothing has changed since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto on February 21 1848. (Hence their ideological creed is surpassed by their material greed).
We live in a period characterised by political noise. What misleads us into thinking there is still a contest of ideas, is the fact that when South Africa jumped into its current political desert, we did so carrying a bag of old slogans that we used to toy with under apartheid.
It is not uncommon in our time to hear a political novice say “revolution” without explaining what they understand by it. Nor is it unusual for political clowns to call themselves champions of the left, without telling us more about the content of their leftism.
Louis Althusser’s observation about pseudo-marxists is indeed relevant to our intellectual desert: “If you take communist philosophers and other communist ‘intellectuals’ and set them officially on a bourgeois ideological and philosophical line in order to ‘criticise’ a regime under which they have suffered deeply, you must not be surprised when the same communists philosophers and intellectuals quite naturally take the road of bourgeois philosophy.”
Here in his article we see Nqatha trying to manage, tame, deflect and douse the flames from the public protector’s report, but his is a sorry attempt to pay his dues in booking a cabinet position.
To qualify to be the vanguard, a communist party must have a revolutionary theory, programme, organisation and strategy. It would have been strategic for the SACP to advise the ANC to stop trying to “manage” the Nkandla report and start to take full ownership of its authorship.
The SACP must make it clear to the ANC that the office of the public protector may be the author of “Secure in Comfort”, but neither that office nor Advocate Thuli Madonsela is the author of the Nkandla scandal.
This is a story authored by the ANC government. At the heart of the story’s plot are key government officials and prominent ANC leaders – none more prominent than the president of the party and the country.
Luthuli House and the Union Buildings should rise to the occasion and take responsibility, not some responsibility, but full responsibility.
Responsibility should not only be for aspects of the Nkandla saga, but for everything about it, especially for originating the very idea of extensive “security improvements” for the private home of a sitting president and for allowing, if not nurturing, the culture and environment where such an idea could emerge and be appropriated so greedily, so improperly and so unethically.
The Presidency, the president and his entire executive should assume collective responsibility for all that went wrong in Nkandla under their watch. The ANC is probably concerned about votes at this time, but taking responsibility for what goes wrong under one’s watch is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength.
At the heart of the public protector’s finding is a huge failure of governance, serious deviations from ethical conduct, and a failure of leadership and oversight.
The ANC should stop being anxious about the possible impact of the report on their election performance.
They should own up to the mess that is Nkandla and approach the South African voter with humility and with the truth.
The voter, especially the loyal ANC voter, will respect the ANC more and not less if the ANC was to say: “We have messed up, we understand the implications of our failure in leadership, we are determined to fix the mess and here is how we are going to do it”.
The ANC should always be reminded that its place in the hearts of millions of South Africans is owed to the history of conducting a moral and ethical struggle largely through moral and ethical means.
The “power” of the ANC derives from the “negotiated revolution” it waged, as well as the reconciliation ideology on which its ascendancy to power was premised. In the light of this, the ANC should use Nkandla to regain its moral stature. The way to do this is to accept full responsibility for Nkandla.
The Nkandla story may not look like a good story to tell, but it is an important story for the ANC to take heed of.
Let the ANC use this debacle to speak truth to itself, to its president and the people of South Africa. Let it form the pole around which it will build a huge anti-corruption plan. Speaking the truth is the least South Africans expect of the ANC. In so doing, a message will have been unequivocally sent to our pseudo-communists that a shrewd politician should recognise when a band-wagon is turning to a tumbril.
Xolani Trevor Somaca is SANCO BCM’s RTT convenor
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