Loose cannon:Robert Kirby
Like so many I find myself touched by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s now routine meditations on national virtue. His sense of right and wrong becomes more acute by the day, his recent utterances seldom lack florid moral embellishment. Homilies about truth and probity fair tumble from his lips. His speeches have that bleaching sermonal bite.
I don’t think Mbeki will go as far as actually taking cloth (that would be too much of a slap in Desmond Tutu’s kisser) and I don’t think, now that he has the winning-post in sight, it’s a case of, “Goodbye Uncle Tom, welcome Uncle Thab.” I think it’s because Mbeki is sincere when he stands up and emits solemn misgivings about the dismal clouds of corruption, graft, hustle, the squalls of looting and lying, the windy prevarications and justifications that have become the African National Congress’s theme weather. What seems clear is that an acquisitive breed of party dissidents are threatening the ANC from within: Under the Counter-Revolutionaries.
I will now get to the point, which is to wonder how Mbeki would rationalise all his rhapsodies about honesty and principle in the light of the publication and distribution last weekend of a huge, high-gloss superpamphlet extolling the achievements of the ANC. Not because the ANC hasn’t got the right to spend lank bucks on preening itself, but because the lank bucks it is spending on doing so do not belong to the ANC. This is public money, coin of the citizens’ purse. And as these lank bucks do not belong to the ANC, spending them on ANC marketing projects is as good as stealing them.
Headed Realising our Hopes the lurid pamphlet/insert in last Sunday’s national newspapers was a collocation of self- congratulatory excerpts from the speeches and public comments of a selection of top ANC functionaries. The insert was of a form not a little reminiscent of those double-page supermarket spreads, but about a hundred times more lavish. A friend of mine in the business estimates that something this extravagant would have come in at well over a couple of million. It was published by some directorate or department calling itself the Government Communication and Information System.
A few of the specials on offer were under stimulating headlines like: “Administration of Justice Transformed”; “Energy and Minerals Benefits Visible”; “Door of Education Open to All Learners”; “Prison Escapes Drop”; “Key Achievements on the Health Front”; and “Effective Efficient Transport”, each one followed by a graphically enhanced mini- panegyric detailing the notable successes achieved by each department.
Nowhere, though, does the ANC’s name appear among all these brightly illustrated testimonials. Instead they abandon their nom de struggle in favour of eponyms like “government” and “Department of Lands” and “Ministry of Defence”. Every triumph – be it in social services, be it in housing or state forests – is attributed to one of these ANC parishes.
If already not obvious, the giveaway is in the introduction to the insert, printed in large red letters across the top of it. This attempts to pass the whole thing off as objective public information.
It runs: “Indications are that South Africans will be going to the polls in May in the country’s second democratic election. At the opening of Parliament earlier this month, President Nelson Mandela and ministers reported to the nation on the government’s activities since it took office in 1994, in the areas of international relations, governance, social services, peace and stability and macro-economic issues. This insert highlights President Mandela’s address to Parliament as well as remarks by ministers at subsequent briefings to journalists and the diplomatic corps.”
Is this audacity or plain ineptitude? For in this crude misdirection is revealed the utter coarseness of the scam. The attempt to pass the exorbitant pro-ANC pamphlet off as an overview, published in the national interest, only reveals how low an opinion the ANC obviously has of its constituents. You don’t have to own a television, read lots of papers or even survive on a wind-up radio to know that the claims in the pamphlet are heavily biased and incomplete.
And it’s not only this pamphlet. Under the guise of voter education and motivation, the radio services throb with the same sort of stuff. Brochures listing ANC successes are handouts in post offices – little doubt again funded by the taxpayer.
As I say, Mbeki both recommends and promises us a national government splendid in its moral epitomes. I have no reason to mistrust his sincerity, but I’d like to hear his justification for these blatant rip-offs.