I had the pleasure of working with Matthews Phosa at Codesa. We served on the same committee. In those heady days we held the destiny of our great nation in our timorous but excited little hands.
Great was the division among us but greater still was the conviction that we were the people who could be trusted to bridge the enormous divide and to enlarge hope beyond our wildest expectations.
Matthews Phosa, personable and intelligent man that he is, helped enormously to brand the ANC in those days as the hope of South Africa and the world. To see this enthusiastic leader of the ANC so dispirited now and so shorn of hope indicates just how bad things are. We must take him seriously to avert catastrophe.
His call for ANC members to support him in asking Jacob Zuma to step down is a necessary step to save the floundering ANC. It has become an inescapable fact that Zuma has to go. The damage he has wreaked has been incalculable.
Like Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng we are all going to be asking the question: “How did it come to this?” It is indeed hard to understand how the great promise of 1994 has turned into a political drought as intense as the drought that has gripped so many parts of the country?
Phosa points out that many of the political elite in the ruling party bear little resemblance to his fellow leaders of 1994. Today, tragically, the esteemed and distinguished leaders of the early years of our democracy are being systematically pushed out.
The voices of reason are being stifled and silenced and the confrontational politics of the stomach has now entrenched itself. Look at the political elite and among them you will see many naked consumerists and recipients of big brown paper bags stuffed with R200 notes.
Bathabile Dlamini let on that the cupboards should not be opened for if they were, the skeletons will come tumbling out.
Many who are railing against white monopoly capital are themselves monopoly capitalists in their own right. Indeed, the truth does not bear revealing.
If citizens do not heed Mbeki, Motlanthe, Phosa, Nzimande and others, a dictatorship is inevitable.
The resources of the nation that should have been directed to uplifting the poor, creating jobs, stimulating the economy and improving services have been wantonly diverted and squandered by Zuma and his hand-picked cadres.
All of what is happening is so reminiscent of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves. We have until now relied too much on the judiciary to keep our democracy alive and in good health. Unfortunately, we can no longer be indifferent and complicit onlookers. We owe it to our children to take a stand.
If the “best” in South Africa continue “to lack conviction” as Yeats wrote of the Irish, the “worst” who will be “filled with passionate intensity” will take over.
The forces of good must now make a stand for the good of everyone and the good of the nation.