/ 9 December 2005

Eish, 2005!

What a sordid end to a sordid year! The rape charge laid against Jacob Zuma this week, which effectively ended his political career, rounded off 12 months that have shaken the foundations of our democracy.

The African National Congress has been split and so have the allied organisations with which it governs the country. As the ruling party has stumbled from crisis to crisis, South Africa’s vaunted political stability has come under threat.

Yes, the economy is booming, but speak to people in government and it becomes clear that the ship of state is tilting as key decisions are put on hold and key leaders become embroiled in the biggest political crisis of the post-apartheid period. South Africa watchers, who see in this country all that the continent can become, must watch aghast.

Zuma should have stood down, or been made to stand down, long before his travails visited a tsunami upon the land. Instead, we have been impaled by ambition and greed, as different factions align not around ideology, but around who can deliver the largest contracts, the next tender …

There have been glimmers of light amid the gloom. We have found, again, a nascent debating spirit, and within the ANC and its tripartite alliance brave people have shown themselves able to speak up, whether to question the left credentials of Zuma or even the economics of the Gautrain.

The saddest aspect of the years under President Thabo Mbeki has been the end of debate, as he has sought to manage the country to prosperity. What do we do now?

It must surely be the end of Zuma’s aspirations. Only his little lieutenants in the ANC and communist youth leagues seem to be hanging on to Jacob’s ladder.

It is time to build on the culture of debate that has taken hold, to question everything. This is the way the country was made, and how it will be made to prosper.

It is time to put the Constitution at centre stage and to insist that any future presidential candidate does the same. In the early rounds of the succession battle, too much that was precious was threatened: be it a commitment to clean government, to scrupulous personal standards or even to media freedom. This week, for example, the press was barred from court as Zuma was secretly whisked in and out.

As a nation, we have been asked in this awful year to settle for less than the standards we set ourselves in the Constitution, for lesser values and lesser leaders. These expectations must end as 2005 ends.

The lesson for the ruling party as it heads toward the 2007 conference at which it will choose a presidential candidate is that it should open the race up wide and let a dynamic leader surface. No one should be anointed as “Mbeki’s candidate” or the “left’s favourite” or the “Zuma compromise”.

The only candidate we want is the one who is good for South Africa.

Death by freedom dust

With the Nobel Prizes being handed out this weekend, we confess to a small regret. If we had managed to get our act together, we would have nominated a far worthier peace laureate than the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director general. We refer to United States President George “Dubya” Bush.

Not since Adolf Hitler has a world leader done so much to tarnish the reputation of war and warmongering. Only to the most uninformed and patriotically blinkered (unfortunately, this still seems to include much of the American media) can the Iraqi misadventure seem a glorious affair worth dying for.

Georgie Boy started on the wrong foot by launching hostilities in the teeth of the world community and before United Nations weapons inspectors had finished their work. This created the unmistakable impression that the US a) must have wars like a wino needs his Tassies, b) had “oilier-than-thou” motives quite removed from the advancement of democracy and peace, and/or c) to quote a former M&G editor, “had a giant hard-on after 9/11 and was determined to put it somewhere”. The result, as we all know, was no weapons of mass destruction and no official reason to station 160 000 troops in someone else’s country. Not that this minor intelligence glitch made any difference …

Miscalculation number two, inspired by the dauntless optimism that “underneath it all, they really love us”, was the expectation that Iraqis would pour on to the streets and shower victorious GIs with rosewater and Turkish Delight. In fact, after Bush’s “mission accomplished”, the only thing to shower the victors was shrapnel.

From initial rock bottom, it has all been downhill: Abu Ghraib, “renditions” (read “concentration camps in third countries”), Halliburton, roadside blasts, suicide bombings, Fallujah, the Patriot Act, internecine religious strife and a steady homeward trickle of “caskets” draped in Old Glory. There is now a real chance that Iraq will fly apart into several warring fractions, or, better still, of a genocide of Sunni Muslims.

Is Dubya downcast? Not a bit of it! His administration has decided on a much more vigorous effort to repackage and sell the war to increasingly disenchanted Americans. As The Guardian observed this week, it can only be days before Fox News starts referring to white phosphorus as “freedom dust”…