We are fighting against continued government betrayal and bankruptcy

A few weeks ago, it was announced that more than R1.5 trillion had been looted from the state’s coffers between 2014 and 2019.

Many millions more have been stolen through ATM robberies, CIT attacks, business and house robberies, Covid and tender corruption and so forth.

Is our government ashamed of this disintegration of morals? No.

Is our government doing anything to rectify matters? No. Although we have commissions, they never find anyone guilty of anything. No-one is given a lengthy prison sentence. It is almost a given fact that in South Africa, crime pays – handsomely, if you are a politician.

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A quote from Taylor Caldwell’s book A Pillar of Iron attributes the following to the Roman statesman Cicero: “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within… the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

“For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it
can no longer resist …”

Perhaps Caldwell was envisioning our beloved country in 2021 as we have many traitors who sit in high office. Men and women whose sole purpose in life is to enrich themselves while betraying those whose trust was placed in them.

They have rotted the soul of our nation through their betrayal of the voters.

They have used their betrayal to practise the age-old tactic of “divide and rule”.

They have stood on their podiums of clay and fake gold and preached conflict and chaos to reject all forms of accountability.

The have encouraged lawlessness while indulging in lawlessness. But we ought to already be used to what is happening… Over a year ago, Lieutenant-General Bonang Christine Mgwenya, South Africa’s deputy national police commissioner – the most senior female police officer in the land – was arrested for fraud, corruption and theft
involving a R191-million tender.

Her salary was in excess of R1 million a year. She was appointed as then Saps commissioner Bheki Cele’s COO in the office of the national commissioner – an appointment made without due process. Astonishingly, she needed more.

But the case has gone quiet … as usual. Ironically, we have a police force that ignores the multiple farm attacks and murders that occur almost daily. When home invasions, robberies and murders take place, does the Saps act? Very seldom.

But when a politician is murdered, no expense is spared at mobilising task teams to investigate and bring the perpetrators to justice. It seems only the lives of politicians matter. If not, then why are there two different approaches to law and order and justice?

Why has governance at local levels collapsed? Why does national government only speak words we long to hear at election time? Is it simply because our government has lost all control, or is the government waging a war against the citizens? Cicero famously warned us that “laws are silent in time of war.”

For those who have yet to realise it, we are engaged in a war driven by the government against its people. In turn, we are fighting against continued government betrayal and bankruptcy.

Yet those who indulge in this treason are simply redeployed – often as ambassadors.

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This redeployment is nothing other than a method of removing the traitors from the public eye.

As our citizens bend and buckle under the yoke of failed policies promulgated by our pseudo-democracy, our political leaders continue to shamelessly exercise their entitled betrayal.

There is no flag large enough to cover this national shame. Indeed, the emblems of our political leadership are self-centred indulgence and entitlement, along with ill-gotten wealth.

But the question remains: How long will our voters remain silent and accepting of this criminal-inspired socioeconomic tyranny that has been forced on them?

Or has the war the government declared on its own people reached its zenith? It is highly unlikely that it has.

We voted them back to allow them to continue their betrayal.

– Mashaba is a political advisor.