Anti-apartheid cleric Allan Boesak has lashed out at the African National Congress and Cape Town mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo for failing to fire her media spin doctor, Roderick Ngoro, over his racist comments about coloured people.
This failure had raised serious questions about non-racialism in the ANC, said Boesak, and would count against the party in the coming local government elections.
The political firebrand said on Tuesday that he was speaking as a "deeply concerned" ANC member.
He said he had been told by a delegation of church leaders representing some of the leading denominations in the Western Cape that they planned to use the pulpit to preach that one could not vote for an organisation that allowed such racist remarks to go unchallenged.
Ngoro said in an essay on his website that coloured people were culturally inferior to black people, whom he termed Africans. He said coloured people would die "a drunken death" if they did not go through a process of ideological transformation.
Ngoro is currently on leave. His remarks, posted on his website www.asiaafrorights.org last November, were exposed recently.
An outraged Boesak said that had anyone made such derogatory remarks about black people they would have been "hanged from the highest tree" by now.
Boesak, who was given a presidential pardon last year after being convicted of fraud and theft of donor money in 1999, said he was "deeply concerned and upset" by the way the ANC, and particularly the mayor, were handling the matter.
He said it was "incredibly politically stupid" to allow someone like Ngoro, to whom the ANC had no allegiance, to alienate a large chunk of the electorate from whom it sought support in the local government elections likely to be held in December.
But his concerns were deeper than that, Boesak said. The handling of the Ngoro affair also reinforced perceptions that coloureds were not being taken seriously, except at election time.
He did not believe that Ngoro's comments reflected the thinking of the leadership of the ANC, but its inaction was feeding this perception.
Boesak said the longer the Ngoro issue was debated, the longer it would take the ANC to see itself restored in the confidence of all communities - black, white and coloured - in relation to its commitment to non-racialism.
Boesak, former leader of the United Democratic Front, said: "I come from the UDF tradition of non-racialism, where we did not make distinctions in terms of colour."
The Ngoro furore has exploded around Mfeketo at a time when she is also under attack over service delivery issues.
After the remarks were first spotted on Ngoro's website, she distanced herself from them, but the ensuing uproar prompted her to order a probe.
The Human Rights Commission has ruled that Ngoro's remarks did not constitute hate speech, but were "racist".
There has been a barrage of criticism of Ngoro's remarks across the political spectrum, condemning him and calling for his head.
Boesak, now minister to the Piketberg congregation of the World Congregation of Reformed Churches, said: "Two weeks have come and gone already, and the ANC hasn't taken action against Ngoro yet."
"Serious questions can now be raised about the ANC's principle of non-racialism."
Boesak said a lot of people wanted to revive coloured nationalism and the lack of action against an ANC man like Ngoro would fuel this sentiment. - Staff Writer.