The people – enemies of the people
At the ANC’s Polokwane conference this year its ‘Zanufication’ became flagrant for the first time – you could see and hear the change in tone, and if you could get close enough, it would jump up and spit in your face. Like Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF, the ANC has found a potent weapon in harnessing its members’ thuggery and endorsing it with cynical silence. Since then it has become an ever more openly held ‘policy’.
It is obvious to many people that the ANC is among the biggest threats to South Africa’s constitutional democracy (though not the biggest). To many within its own ranks – as well as the entire rest of the country – the party has become a liability and an embarrassment.
And yet some appear to delight in its sociopathic behaviour; there is no other conclusion. While nobody will admit as much, a poll on the weekend shows that 74% of decided voters will vote the ANC back into power next year. If this is true, with all that we know about the ANC’s criminality, arrogance, incompetence and racism, I’d say the real enemy of the people and democracy is not the ANC. The ANC is but an expression of the hatred still fermenting in the hearts of those who suffered under apartheid. It answers a need in the market.
A Metro FM DJ referred last week to the debate among ordinary black people – should the transition to majority rule in 1994 have been as peaceful as it was? Should there not have been war? It was a shocking thing to hear, but it is by no means an unthinkable preoccupation of a once oppressed people.
We may as well confront the real issue: Peace is far from guaranteed if the ANC can incite violence among its followers, and its followers are not only susceptible to it, but reward a rogue party with re-election.
Tags: 74%, Add new tag, ANC, democracy, Polokwane, Zanu PF, Zanufication
