No revolution in sight with this ANC

An ANC supporter holds a flag of the ANC while the President Jacob Zuma addresses ANC Gauteng Cadre Assembly in Pretoria. Picture: Phill Magakoe

An ANC supporter holds a flag of the ANC while the President Jacob Zuma addresses ANC Gauteng Cadre Assembly in Pretoria. Picture: Phill Magakoe

Published Oct 7, 2014

Share

The ANC has strayed from its revolutionary path and poses a threat to the stability and future of our children, writes Max du Preez.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing revolutionary about the 2014 version of the ANC. And yet its leaders can hardly manage to make a public speech without calling themselves revolutionaries.

This kind of cheap talk reminds me of an AWB meeting in Potchefstroom I reported on in 1992. It was a rowdy meeting with Eugene Terre’Blanche in full flight, using the k-word and promising a violent white uprising. Then I noticed one of the loudest men in the front, Nazi-salute and all, was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Let me give you an example of how the ANC has succeeded in removing all meaning from the word revolutionary. One of the longest living ANC stalwarts and long-serving ANC MP, Ben Turok, a man who gave his entire life to the struggle and was author of a part of the 1955 Freedom Charter, writes in his latest book how he had serious misgivings when the ANC introduced the secrecy bill to Parliament.

“The bill seemed an entirely unnecessary case of overkill from a minister of intelligence services determined to increase his empire,” he says.

When MPs had to vote on the bill, Turok announced to the ANC that he was going to leave the house rather than vote against it. It took serious guts from a man who had joined the Communist Party in 1953, who was an Umkhonto we Sizwe recruit in 1961 and spent years in a Pretoria jail before he went into exile to express his dissent like that.

What did the ANC do? They charged him with “counter-revolutionary conduct”.

 

Or perhaps it was appropriate in an Orwellian kind of way. If the ANC defines what they're about right now as “revolutionary”, then the likes of Turok are counter-revolutionary. Then all patriotic citizens should be counter-revolutionaries.

People like me identified closely with the United Democratic Front and the ANC in the 1980s because the liberation movement, flaws and all, was the only real progressive force in the country. There is nothing progressive about the ANC of 2014. Nothing.

The bitter irony is that it was a leader of the SACP that coined the phrase “the Zanu-fication of the ANC”. Today the SACP is in the vanguard of this process with its Stalinist tendencies, its blind protection of corrupt, self-enriching leaders and its attacks on free speech. Any criticism is rejected as anti-majoritarianist.

The ANC has never in its history been further removed from the people of the country and its needs and dreams as it is today. Its only blueprint for the future, the National Development Plan, lies in the wastepaper basket. There are no signs of us becoming a developmental state.

Luthuli House is spending much of its energy on what it sees as its most urgent task: the protection of its free-spending, scandal-prone leader, Jacob Zuma. That’s what the liberation movement has been reduced to, and it won’t even hesitate to compromise the credibility and integrity of Parliament in its quest to do so.

The refusal to allow a spiritual leader and Nobel laureate a visa is a recent manifestation of the ANC’s moral bankruptcy – as is its lies that it hadn’t refused the Dalai Lama a visa, that he had instead withdrawn his application. His office made it clear weeks ago that it was told in no uncertain terms that the South African government didn’t regard it in the national interest to allow him to visit.

Rhodes University’s Richard Pithouse says about “Zuma-ism”: “It takes the form of crony capitalism buttressed with the support of authoritarian states, notably Russia and China, and a new authoritarianism, organised in the name of tradition and patriotism, and mediated through a substantive shift in power to the police, intelligence and traditional authority.”

Many of those who still believe that the ANC has an historic mission to deliver real freedom and prosperity to all are now hoping the mini-revolt by the Gauteng ANC will be the beginning of the end of Zuma-ism. We will have to see whether this was driven more by fear of losing votes in the 2016 municipal election than by a belief that the ANC should return to its values of service to the people.

Perhaps it’s the only way to get the ANC to snap out of its disastrous ways: reduce its electoral majority even more in 2016. Threaten its hold on power and privilege.

We’ll need a focused, well-organised and energetic opposition to achieve this.

But we can’t wait 18 months for this to happen. We should all, ANC members included, raise our voices a few notches.

The course the ANC is on threatens our stability, growth and our children’s future.

* Max du Preez is an author and columnist.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Newspapers.

Cape Times

Related Topics: