That it should come to this. The African National Congress, once the pride of democrats the world over for the levels of humanity and intelligence it brought to the struggle against apartheid, is in danger of becoming the very converse of all it used to represent. The past fortnight has demonstrated how recklessly the ANC leadership is disregarding its finest traditions, and squandering the moral and political authority it enjoyed when it was led to power by President Nelson Mandela in 1994.
There are those who will ask: Well, should we expect anything different? Is the ANC not merely becoming a normal political party?
Perhaps there is a lot in favour of whose who take this view. But we on this newspaper think otherwise.
For, in the ANC’s departure from the moral and political foundations on which it was built, we see worrying – and sinister – patterns. There lurks an underlying cynicism, a potential malevolence and a disregard for people. The intellectually bereft discourse in which the ANC leadership is imprisoning our politics on the HIV/Aids pandemic and the Zimbabwean crisis disregards overwhelming evidence. As one observer put it this week, the ANC is disappearing up the orifices of its own assumptions. If this continues, meaningful conversation among South Africans – and between us and much of the rest of the world – may soon become difficult.
Over the past fortnight, the ANC has concluded that the recent presidential elections in Zimbabwe were “credible”, though not free and fair. Its view is untenable. The ANC has taken pride in the distinction it has drawn between a credible, a legitimate, and a free and fair election. This demonstrates contempt for the rights of ordinary Zimbabweans; it provides a defence for an ageing and paranoid dictator; it forsakes the principles that drove the ANC’s own long struggle for the vote and for human rights for all in this country; and it shames those ANC MPs and leaders who knew better than to back such disingenuous nonsense but lacked the courage to speak out.
We are also apparently supposed to be impressed by President Thabo Mbeki’s promotion of the idea of a government of national unity in Zimbabwe immediately the election results were announced. The timing of his enthusiasm for the GNU concept was clearly intended to alter the focus of public attention so as to enable him to delay giving his own judgement on the poll. How, otherwise, was he going to finesse the contradiction between his own private view and the Commonwealth observer mission’s judgement that the election did not reflect the popular will? This week, however, now that public focus has been successfully shifted, a little-noticed Cabinet statement declared: “President Mbeki has noted and accepted the report of the SA parliamentary observer mission – and the interim report of the South African observer mission.” Meaning? Mbeki believes the elections were “credible”.
While such tacky cleverness may dazzle some, it is difficult to draw any comfort from the cruel and arrogant stupidity of his denialist position on HIV/Aids. To judge by the outcome of its meeting last weekend, this idiocy now affects almost the entire ANC national executive committee ? bar Mandela and a handful of others. A subsequent NEC statement represented several steps backwards towards the classical denialist position that rejects the link between HIV and Aids, disputes the prevalence of the disease in our region, and says anti-retroviral drugs do not work.
Of course, many more members of the NEC disagree with Mbeki’s baloney. But for reason of fear or ambition, or in the mistaken, quasi-Stalinist belief that party unity or discipline is a sufficient reason to hide from the truth, they say nothing. By so doing, they have become complicit in ending a culture of debate in the ANC on which the party’s capacity for renewal has always depended. They have also made themselves complicit in the deaths of thousands as a result of the ANC’s posture.
Worse, the ANC is distributing a document on HIV/Aids that purports to provide an intellectual basis for this nonsense. It bears all the hallmarks of our president’s pretentious, and often flawed, use of literary and scientific references. In the way we have witnessed with rising frequency from this quarter since 1999, a bitter anti-white sentiment that runs contrary to the ANC’s tradition of non-racialism is insinuated into the text. Nkosi Johnson was, the author would have us believe, snatched away from his culture, and kept away from it even in death. Nkosi’s white foster-mother, Gail Johnson, evidently felt nothing for the child.
The voice of unreason now threatens the ANC. It endangers those areas in which rationality has prevailed – notably in economic policy. The party’s finest traditions – non-racialism, popular sovereignty, a human rights culture, compassion and tolerance of diversity – are being cynically flouted. Cowardice and unctuous fealty to the leader increasingly provide the path to preferment. The ANC is adopting intellectually ridiculous and morally untenable positions with little, or no, mechanism for correction. It is in danger of losing contact with reality and the world.
It is losing the plot.