Italo Calvino coined this phrase – the cemetery of spent hours.
Soon there will be an important motion of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma to be our guiding president.
It appears that the ANC is warning their parliamentarians to vote the ANC’s pre-decided way or to face political and therefore financial ruin. So what they really say is that it is not about putting South Africa first, it is about putting the ANC first.
It is about power and positioning at all cost.
Not about a struggling country with masses of suffering and hopeless people and the urgency to implement clinical, substantial procedures to prevent and to revisit corruption that costs the country with a vengeance.
It is not about morality, honesty, conscience, self-respect. It is about base pragmatism, opportunism and it is about the ongoing implementation of a cemetery for humanity, hope and a moral future.
We are not alone in this world, the instinct to survive at all costs in disregard of helpless people, is in fact an international sickness. A huge cemetery of the soul.
So when people we previously chose to be our leaders, that we deem to gather in Parliament to rule on our behalf, having our well-being at heart, sit down to vote for the motion of mistrust and disgust in the president saying that we need to save our country from interest groups that have no moral fibre, manoeuvring in never ending greed, or they will otherwise be queuing up to build their own eventual cemeteries where it will be known that these parliamentarians too lived without integral morals.
Are we talking about you? Does your soul fit the bill?
What about us, we the people? This letter is not anti-ANC directed.
It is, though, a plea not to continue plundering the heart of the ANC, their historic soul. The ANC had its beginning in a time when most people were rendered second-hand citizens, when their existence was immaterial and disposable.
Don’t slip into the shoes of past brutalities, don’t become quietly numb (Roger Waters) and deem the pursuing of superficial materialism, those cars, those houses, those clothes, those shallow parties, the cute looking bank accounts enough to keep the skinned soul at bay.
The ANC is in these days practically deciding about its very future. Either returning to honourable times or to join the Nationalist Party of the past into eventual oblivion. The cemetery of myopic biased ideologies and the accompanying cancer creeping to the bone.
A place where the future will be too ashamed to be seen visiting, where the only tears will be coming from people watching the cemetery of parliamentarians that had no compassion, that had their fill of private laughs, millions and billions when masses were living in extreme poverty, jobless, as the ruling class had their shallow Christmases, frivolous happy New Year's and all those fantastic days in-between.
The culture of self-absorption must stop. When politicians, business people, spend all their time to find ways to accumulate power and market share, the attitude dribbles through. Then ordinary people start to follow suit. There is this crude saying, "f*** the poor".
When you live according to that holy principle of unaccountable self-advancement, you join the living dead daily plastering shallow cemeteries. So, honourable member of Parliament your hour will arrive.
You will have in front of you the choice to walk tall or to be callow.
May I ask you at least this, should you decide to go the general party line, not to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror the very next morning. A face reflecting real truth will be looking back at you.
The face of one who chose to join the in-crowd of immoral people.
No, you cannot get away with a mere "we will rectify this sickness later on but for now morality and human decency must stand aside in my life".
It is your democratic right – the choice to help building the cemetery of humanity or to walk towards humanity.