This past week has held a message for the men and women at the top of the African National Congress. It has been delivered by two apparently unrelated events.
That warning is this: that the people of this country will resist, and publicly shame, the ANC leadership’s attempts to curtail debate.
There are a number of significant aspects to the two-day Cosatu strike against privatisation. Among the more noteworthy is the breakdown in communication that preceded it between, on one hand, the federation, the largest organisation in the country, and the ANC leadership and government, on the other. Cosatu president Willie Madisha’s interview on pages 34 and 35 describes the attitude senior ANC leaders have taken towards their allies in government. It is an attitude of contempt. It is, basically one of “no debate; we decide; you abide”.
In years to come, Cosatu may well have to concede that its campaign against privatisation was ill-advised. It is likely, however, to be able to look back with pride on its determination to reassert the culture of debate and internal democracy that was once among the greatest strengths of the ANC tradition.
The kind of association the ANC leadership has sought to impose on its allies in government, who also include the South African Communist Party, mirrors its relations with a number of other significant actors in the nation’s affairs. Yes, of course, the ANC leadership wants democracy. But it is as if ANC leaders now place a condition on that commitment. That condition is: democracy, accountability and debate, yes but only if we in the ANC leadership can be sure that the outcome will favour us.
In no case has this incipient pattern been more evident than in the arms scandal. A number of ANC leaders and senior officials have employed a range of devices resonant of the old apartheid regime to block the unvarnished truth from emerging. Moreover, they have ducked and dived to prevent any of their number from taking responsibility for this massive misallocation of resources. And they have shown a determined reluctance to act against, or distance themselves from, those MPs, former government ministers and former defence force officials who have shamelessly enriched themselves on the back of the R50-billion taxpayers are forking out to pay for these armaments.
Now we have the resignation as an ANC MP of Andrew Feinstein, a politician of exemplary integrity, hard work and intelligence, who fought hard to ensure that the public he was in Parliament to serve could get the full facts of the arms deal. On page 3 in this edition, Feinstein tells of his frustrations and deepening concern as his party suppressed debate among its MPs, curtailed the ability of the key public finance committee to investigate the arms scandal and effectively turned Parliament into a rubber stamp for decisions taken elsewhere.
Feinstein is only one MP. The ANC leadership may, in arrogant foolishness, draw some comfort from this. For the rest of us, however, this is grounds for even more serious concern. Where are all the other ANC MPs of conspicuous integrity? Or, was there only one?
The pattern of behaviour we identify among the ANC leadership is dangerous stuff. It is an early indication of what might yet come to pass but it is no less dangerous for being so.
South Africans and others in this region are no strangers to the phenomenon whereby those who fought for freedom in years past rapidly acquire a taste for suppressing it.
This is behaviour apparently based on the conviction among those who once led the struggle for freedom that they should, henceforth, have sole rights to decide the future.
Like hell.
Normal sport, abnormal society
The South African cricket team travels to Zimbabwe next week amid controversy over the wisdom of the tour at a time when our northern neighbour is racked by the twin crises of land invasions and economic chaos.
Just 11 years ago South African opinion was also split by a cricket tour. In 1990 Mike Gatting’s English rebels played a game in Pietermaritzburg the day after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. That tour was eventually aborted after political pressure. Leading the protests were those who believed in the South African Council on Sport slogan: “No normal sport in an abnormal society.”
It’s ironic that the opponents of this year’s tour are the same people who supported the Gatting rebels, claiming they wanted politics kept out of sport and many of the Sacos supporters are pressing for the Zimbabwe tour to go ahead.
Confusing the issue is that cricket in Zimbabwe is still predominantly a white man’s game, and cancelling the tour would hurt that community much more than it would affect President Robert Mugabe’s government.