President Jacob Zuma.
The ANC's national executive committee (NEC) gathers in Irene over the next few days for a crucial meeting ahead of the party's national candidates' list conference for next year's elections.
The ANC is the governing party and will no doubt remain in power for another five-year term, albeit with what is likely to be a reduced majority. Our electoral system does not allow us to vote directly for the man or woman who should become our president – or, indeed, any particular individual in Parliament or the provincial legislature. We vote for political parties, and the party that wins the national election determines who our president will be for the next five years. Which is why the ANC's top 86 leaders on the NEC and those attending the list conference have a great responsibility.
Those 86 people, in particular, are the ANC's leadership collective. It may be trite to say it, but they hold our future in their hands. It is a responsibility that we hope will not be underestimated and that the committee will try to put the interests of South Africa first.
The scandal of Nkandla should help to focus the minds of the ANC's top brass on whether they are in political leadership to see to the needs of one particular person or to do the right thing for the people of South Africa as a whole. Nkandla is about the extravagant abuse of public resources in the interests of one man, his extended family and his hand-picked consultants and contractors. We have seen Cabinet ministers and the governing party's top honchos lining up to defend this extravagance, to make excuses for it, to deflect attention away from the hard facts now uncovered, and to keep the most sordid details from the public eye. They have gone to court; they have held press conference after press conference.
Imagine if that level of energy, dedication and determination, never mind the funds, were committed to the real work of government in the interests of all South Africans.
Various ANC leaders have in the past warned about careerists and opportunists joining the movement with the sole aim of furthering personal careers and using state power to enrich themselves. These warnings appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
There was hope, around the time of the 2007 Polokwane conference that saw Thabo Mbeki ousted as ANC president and replaced by Jacob Zuma, that this would signal a renewed openness in the ANC after a time in which its president suppressed internal dissent and reacted viciously to external critique. There was a belief that the errors, arrogance and denialism of the Mbeki ANC were at an end.
But somehow the party lost its way. There was no renewed attempt by the governing party to live up to the openness, transparency and accountability enshrined in our Constitution. Instead, there has been increased abuse of state resources and an obsession with secrecy – with finding and enacting any and all ways to hide information from the public. When the media, or institutions such as the public protector, do reveal sensitive information in the public interest, they are roundly excoriated by the very people who should be battling for transparency, accountability and just plain honesty.
We ask: Why? Who is really being protected?
South Africa on the eve of 20 years of democracy is not anywhere near where it should be. We risk repeating the mistakes of other countries on our continent with liberation movements turned governments.
In that light, we would ask the members of the ANC's NEC and delegates to the list conference to bear the following questions in mind:
Who really should be Number One?
Is it the current president of the ANC and president of South Africa?
Does it include his immediate and extended family?
Does it include the Johnny-come-latelies who are exploiting his weaknesses and his well-documented inability to manage his own finances?
Does it include the sycophants who are unable to say "the emperor has no clothes", because it is also their "time to eat" and they are enjoying the feast of their lives?
Does it include the chickens and livestock in the president's private homestead, which are probably better off than many of the villagers in Nkandla and beyond?
Does it include the securocrats who are hellbent on severely limiting the democratic space that so many people suffered and died to open up?
If not, what do you intend to do? Will you take us along this path of destruction, or will you do the right thing?
We ask, who really should be Number One?
And we would argue that, in fact, Number One should be the people of South Africa.
Number One should also be our fellow Africans around the continent.
Number One should be ubuntu and concern for the less privileged, not the unbridled greed of the politically connected few.
Number One should be health and prosperity for all.
South Africa belongs to all of us and, as key leaders who uphold the ideals of the Freedom Charter, the ANC NEC and the list conference delegates should know this.