Mr President, failures are not mistakes

After close to three decades of misrule and monumental corruption, all President Cyril Ramaphosa could admit in the ANC’s annual January 8th Statement speech he delivered at the weekend in Mbombela is that the ruling party made some mistakes.

And to make it more clear to those he wanted to convince that South Africa finds itself in the economic and social mess it is because of “unintentional errors” the ANC made, he went on to detail how “the democratic South Africa of today is very different from the lived experience of South Africa 30 years ago”.

Only a fool would argue that life was better under apartheid but, then again, only an even more foolish and ignorant person would agree that mistakes brought this country a failed Post Office, a corrupt arms deal, a toothless National Prosecution Authority, a collapsed rail network, 46% unemployment rate, a deteriorating national roads infrastructure, a decaying Johannesburg, a Durban with sewerage on its previously pristine beaches… the list is endless.

No, Mr President, these are not mistakes.

Call them what they are, failures of the governing party.

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No sane politician would admit to overt failures in an election year but in this case, if the ANC wants to be taken seriously by those people who are not traditional ANC voters, it has to come face-to-face with the truth of its failures, admit to them and then try to convince voters to accept that those failures are not fatal.

That would be a start, but politicians are not built that way. They believe an admission of failure leads to losses at the polls.

So, they water down the truth and call the misappropriation of R500 billions of Covid relief funds a “mistake”. No, it was not a mistake. It was a failure of governance.

No-one must attempt to take away the ANC’s history and role in the struggle to liberate South Africa. That would be disingenuous, even for the party’s worst enemy.

But part of the ANC’s 112-year-old history is that it has been in government for those 30 years. And a candid look back at its performance would give the party a straight A in the liberation struggle but a measly F in governance.

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Unfortunately, struggle performance did not do enough to prepare the organisation to run a country.

Former UK prime minister Winston Churchill took Britain through the worst that Adolf Hitler and his allies could dish out.

He made sure that the bombs raining from the skies did not break the spirit of the British people and also took risky trips overseas canvassing world leaders to stand up against Hitler and fascism.

Yet as soon as victory was secured, the British people voted him out in 1945. They did not want a wartime leader to be their peacetime leader.

Perhaps this is the realisation that must dawn on the leadership of the oldest liberation movement, that leading a liberation struggle was their best effort, but that could not translate into running a country.

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Like Churchill, Ramaphosa is scoring rave reviews on the international front.

Only last year he led an African delegation to try to stop the Russia-Ukraine war and his government has brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice to try to stop what is seen as a genocide in Gaza.

Ramaphosa and his comrades are drowning in international admiration but on the domestic front, not so much.

General sentiment is that people are tired of failures like calling a swimming pool built with stolen government money a firepool.

Defending Jacob Zuma was not a mistake but a failure to use parliament to govern.

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