The system works. The conviction of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, African National Congress MP, Women’s League president and national executive committee member, shows that the criminal justice system will convict even the politically most powerful.
It also worked in February when ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni was convicted on corruption charges.
And the fact that the Scorpions are pursuing arms deal-linked corruption charges against Deputy President Jacob Zuma as well as former transport minister Mac Maharaj also indicates the genesis of a prosecutorial system independent of the political lean-to that characterises so many other countries on the continent.
So far, so good. There is one more step necessary to ensure the body politic remains squeaky clean. And that is for the ANC, as a party, to be more forthright in its condemnation of the greedy and the unaccountable. Supporters of Madikizela-Mandela try to paint her as an innocent in the hands of an unscrupulous broker, who made her sign loan-forms unwittingly.
Last week lawyers in another court case to forestall her disciplining by Parliament tried to portray her as a schoolyard innocent facing the wrath of parliamentary whips. What nonsense. Madikizela-Mandela is a serial delinquent. The court decided her fate on Thursday.
Now the ANC must follow suit with both her and its other-child-gone-wrong, Yengeni. But, as it did in the immediate aftermath of the Yengeni judgement, the ANC has fallen short of condemnation and sanction. Efforts to secure an official party response to Madikizela-Mandela’s sentencing met with the run-around.
Clearly, the ANC has no position and no clear plan, though some leaders have tried to persuade Madikizela-Mandela to stand down from her parliamentary post.
The party must take stronger action against both Madikizela-Mandela and Yengeni by using the ANC disciplinary code to take them to task and to relieve them of all executive duties. Anything less will surely be construed as thumbing its nose at the justice system.
The omens are not good. Madikizela-Mandela’s misdemeanours are legend, yet she holds several leadership positions. Yengeni continues to hold party office and is even part of the team sorting out the Eastern Cape. Could it be because both are party populists and vote-catchers? Or is there a deeper malaise in the ANC that makes it unable to practise the doctrine of clean government it preaches?
Another clown in the cast
In the heady and often clumsy debate about South Africa’s response to the HIV/Aids crisis, there is no shortage of ridiculous pronouncements on the disease.
Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, in her own inimitable way, leads an international cast of clowns that stars Western scientists who, from the comforts of their distant climes, tell us that the deadly crisis we face is a figment of our imagination.
But we as South Africans should be seriously concerned when we see the sort of nonsensical gumpf being spewed by the African National Congress Youth League.
Writing in the Sowetan this week, the youth league spokesman, Khulekani Ntshangase, charged that the Treatment Action Campaign was no different from the murderous vigilante group People against Gangsterism and Drugs; that this lobby group’s leaders should be arrested for campaigning for the “poisoning of our people”; and that the trade union movement was “participating in the killing of its membership and the entire community”.
Now this young man is famed for his imbecilic utterances and the easiest reponse is to giggle and shrug him off. But he is unfortunately the voice of the ruling party’s youth wing and it is not inconceivable that some people out there may take him seriously.
There are places where people of such intellectual disposition are confined.