It’s blackmail, pure and simple

Well, there we have it, then. The pure unvarnished political villainy of the ANC laid bare by President Cyril Ramaphosa.

At the ANC’s 112th anniversary bash in Mbombela he did publicly what the organisation’s grassroots organisers have been doing for some time – threaten people with the lie that, if the ANC is voted out of power, they will lose their social grants.

It’s blackmail, pure and simple. And it proves that the organisation is bankrupt in terms of ideas and policies which it can genuinely sell to the people in the upcoming general election.

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The ANC has no evidence that should it lose power to the Democratic Alliance or Economic Freedom Fighters or any other parties in an opposition coalition, that the incoming government would scrap social assistance for the poorest and most vulnerable in society.

Such assistance is guaranteed as a right in our constitution and no-one will, or wants to, challenge the constitution on that score.

What a new government might well do, though, is bring about an end to the looting of such social assistance packages – and the example of the alleged malfeasance at the National Student Financial Aid Scheme is appropriate here – by the ANC and its cadre deployees.

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Cleaning the corrupt morass of social grants is not the same as scrapping them altogether and Ramaphosa and the ANC know that only too well.

What is most disappointing about Ramaphosa’s comments is that they show him as cut from exactly the same cloth as his comrades in the ANC.

In other words, me first or us (the ANC), and country a distant second.

The fact that he played the organisation’s political trump card in the open shows it is getting increasingly nervous that it won’t be able to answer its opponents on the merits of its performance.