The concept of taking personal responsibility is entirely absent from the DNA of ANC politicians, says William Saunderson-Meyer.
Cape Town - So, it is all okay then? National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete has apologised for labelling her bete noire Julius Malema a “cockroach”. After all, to err is human, to forgive divine?
No, it is not okay. If the farce that played out around President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address were to have a rational resolution, not only would the Speaker be axed, but also the police minister, the national police commissioner, and the state security minister. They either oversaw or tacitly approved the deployment of armed police in the assembly, the jamming of telecommunications, and the use of the faces of opposition MPs as targets for punching practice.
That none of this will happen is evidence, were any needed, that the concept of taking personal responsibility is entirely absent from the DNA of ANC politicians. More crucially, they were all doing exactly what Number One demanded of them, or at least expected of them.
It beggars belief that Mbete, the supposedly steady hand on the tiller during parliamentary squalls, would ever use the inflammatory term “cockroach”, the word that ignited Rwanda’s genocidal mayhem of 1994. To do so during a period when South Africa is experiencing one of its periodic xenophobic convulsions and foreign shop owners are being attacked by nationalistic mobs in the townships – while the police for the most part stand idly by and on occasion are alleged to have participated – is almost criminal.
Not surprisingly, the EFF complained to the SA Human Rights Commission that this was to incite violence against their leader. One might have been able to take them more seriously were it not that the same Malema had in 2010 called DA leader Helen Zille a cockroach that should be “removed from power” as premier of the Western Cape.
He was speaking at an ANC Youth League rally and was followed on the stage by Zuma who uttered not the faintest rebuke of his then-favourite political Rottweiler. Instead Zuma burst into that old crowd-stirring favourite, his rendition of Umshini wami – “bring me my machine gun”.
Mbete, in fact, had little option but to apologise, since she was facing not only a court interdict and SAHRC censure, but the certainty of procedural chaos in the assembly the moment she took the Speaker’s chair. Her apology at least had the virtue of being unambiguous – “I withdraw my remarks unreservedly. I apologise unconditionally to South Africans, to Parliament and to the Honourable Julius Malema” – unlike Malema who this week grudgingly withdrew his slur of five years ago only after Zille pointed out the ethical anomaly.
Mbete has been a disaster as Speaker. Her arrogance and pettiness in the chair were during last week’s joint sitting for the State of the Nation Address thrown into stark relief by the unruffled and evenhanded Thandi Modise, chairwoman of the National Council of Provinces, who virtually took over the proceedings when Mbete was, again, about to loose her cool.
And although Mbete retracted her cockroach remark, she hasn’t retracted any of the other controversial utterances she made in her capacity as ANC national chairwoman at the same North West provincial party congress. The media and the EFF, she warned, were all part of a Western plot to unseat Zuma and take over South Africa.
“They (the EFF) want to take this country so that they must take over the mines and share them with friends they were seen gallivanting with in Europe… They are pawns in a bigger scheme of things where some Western governments are involved.”
These unnamed Western countries had an issue with Zuma running the country because he was “a stubborn, rural man… committed to ANC policies. How can a rural man sit with them on international structures?”
Mbete also let slip that the state security apparatus had either infiltrated the EFF or was illicitly eavesdropping. The ANC “knew everything” EFF had planned for the State of the Nation Address “including what the red overalls discussed. We knew who was going to stand first and what they were going to say”.
If the West is indeed orchestrating insurrection, this needs to be raised at a weightier forum than a party provincial congress. And if these allegations are to be made publicly, some evidence is needed.
Otherwise it must be seen for what it likely is, a “Mugarbage” propaganda tactic that has worked well for Zanu-PF, of stigmatising any opposition forces as the illicit and unpatriotic dupes of Western imperialism. That’s just one of the tragedies of Zuma’s ANC. Its sixth-most important office bearer’s compass reference points for political discourse are genocidal incitement in Rwanda and the dynamiting of democracy in Zimbabwe.
* William Saunderson-Meyer’s column The Jaundiced Eye appears in Independent Media’s Saturday publications.
** Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye
*** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.