Johannesburg - South Africa has slid from an age of hope and is now trapped in an age of despair where the abuse of political power for self-enrichment is rife.
This is the view of former president Thabo Mbeki, as he reflected on the myriad crises besieging the country.
He was delivering his keynote address at the Sunday Times Top 100 companies awards in Sandton on Tuesday night.
In his hard-hitting speech, Mbeki lamented how political leaders have abandoned their mandate of serving the people, and the corrosive levels of corruption and self-aggrandisement in the ANC-led government.
“First, it is obvious that over the years, progressively since 1994, some negative features have emerged in our governing party, the ANC, which the organisation itself has recognised, including the disease of the abuse of political power for personal enrichment,” he said.
Mbeki’s hard talk came a few hours after the ANC’s national working committee resolved to close ranks around President Jacob Zuma and called on its MPs to vote against the DA’s motion of no confidence in Parliament tomorrow.
This follows the release of former public protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report, which implicated Zuma and some of his cabinet ministers for acts of corruption. Mbeki's speech also came against the backdrop of a tsunami of discontent from within the ranks of the ANC’s top echelon, including veterans, ministers and MPs.
Mbeki - who was unceremoniously recalled from office in 2008 - wrote a letter that was leaked recently to the media, in which tries to persuade Zuma to consider the views of ANC veterans.
Mbeki added on Tuesday night: “The ANC has also spoken out about such negative features within its own ranks as the use of cash to buy members, as well as the abuse of supposedly independent state institutions to advance individual interests.”
His speech was punctuated by the question “What is to be done?”.
“What this means is that all of this serves to undermine and weaken the capacity and possibility for the governing political authority to discharge its responsibilities.”
He said it was time the current administration did a reality check to save the country from sliding further into a quagmire.
“Confronted by this reality, the leadership of the movement could not avoid speaking out against the scourge of endemic corruption.”
Mbeki cited the “looting of public resources through what is described as tenderpreneurship’ and other forms of theft of public resources, and so-called state capture, which speaks to the disease of direct control of people in responsible positions in the public sector by particular business interests”.
He accused the ANC of drifting away from “the ordinary working people and its historic task and raison d’etre, established over a century, of existing solely to serve the interests of the people”.
“Again as you will have heard, these statements spoke of an age of hope, of high levels of optimism about the future among all sectors of our population, of a time when the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing before us’, and of a new period in our national reality when our yesterdays would no longer light fools the way to dusty death.
“However, the hard reality we face today is that our country is trapped in a general and deepening political, economic and social crisis which has, for many, begun to turn what was an age of hope into an age of despair.”
Such was the gravity of the crisis in South Africa, he said, that it might be understandable if critics were to believe he was living in a fool’s paradise when he spoke about the age of hope.
He said all political parties, the executive, and state institutions such as Chapter 9 institutions could have done better to ensure that state organs functioned in a way that they fulfilled their constitutional mandate, following the damning Constitutional Court ruling on Nkandla.
And while South Africa was not “immersed in a general crisis” to a point that it had “arrived at the tipping point when the country becomes ungovernable, with disastrous consequences for black and white, rich and poor, and young and old alike”, he warned of civil strife and instability, as seen in the Marikana bloodbath.
This, Mbeki said, could arise from the lack of trust between business and government, which was leading to “an investment strike”. Investment by businesses had stagnated as confidence languished.