Battle by proxy
This week hundreds of riotous ANC members broke up a significant meeting of their party at Pilanesberg, driving dignitaries off the stage and chanting their rejection of President Mbeki.
The SA Police Services used rubber bullets and truncheons on the disruptive crowd, which invaded the meeting hall and attacked the delegates claiming representation allegedly being denied them.
We could have been back in apartheid South Africa in the seventies.
The SABC reports, in various tongues, merely identified them as 'a group of ANC supporters,' indicating further to what extent the SABC news teams impose self-censorship due to the faction fights in the governing party.
Jacob Zuma said a few weeks ago that the ANC would govern until Jesus Christ returns.
To some this is a blasphemous statement, to others an indication of the man's judgment.
It was inevitable that with the advent of democracy there would be radical new political alignments in a civil society on a pilgrimage for its inner soul.
The once all-powerful National Party simply imploded into nothingness, its former supporters claiming a collective amnesia about the selfishness of apartheid.
The Progs, after their series of metamorphoses, emerged as the DA with leader Helen Zille now calling for yet more realignments.
She's not likely to lure any ANC supporters.
Better offer
After all, the ANC has far more high profile positions to offer budding politicians than does any other party.
Although only the most politically naïve believe there is unity in the ANC, those members with ambitions to contribute their talents to the nation will not run from home.
Instead, they switch their sides in the ANC with astounding elegance and no sense of contradiction. This was shown in Parliament recently when MPs first approved the SABC Board which President Mbeki foisted on them one day after his humiliation at Polokwane.
Then after the realities of who runs the Party filtered through to them and threatened their perceived self-interests, they dumped the same SABC Board.
In the business world this is called back-stabbing.
In politics it's called expediency.
The nation reads about the ruckus around the summons issued against our Chief Commissioner of Police, the suspension of the nation's head of criminal prosecutions and the commissar-like directive of the Director of Home Affairs to his regional heads to ignore parliamentary portfolio committees.
We are also left to ponder why we prosecuted South African mercenaries - white and black - for allegedly plotting to disrupt the rule of a West African oil despot.
Are these soldiers of fortune more criminally liable and depraved than those falling over themselves to allow a non-elected despot like Robert Mugabe to receive weapons to suppress his people?
It is acceptable that politicians fight among themselves.
It is disastrous for the nation when public services become the battlefield.
No comments:
Post a Comment