R22 million Flag debacle shows the ANC’s poor attitude toward governance

The “fire pool mentality” is alive and thriving within the upper ranks of the ANC, if this week’s fiasco of the R22 million flag and its 100m-high flagpole is anything to go by.

This mental aberration seems to afflict leaders of our ruling party when they have to explain yet more wasteful spending (or outright looting … there’s not much to choose between the two) to citizens who daily, struggle to just put food on the table.

It would seem a comrade (or comrades, in the case of the Cabinet) comes up with an excuse which seems, in his or her mind, to be perfectly logical.

Thus, it is not a swimming pool we have built at Nkandla with your tax money, it is a fire prevention system to keep our national hero, Jacob Zuma, safe in the event of an inferno threatening his thatched-roof residence (or indeed, even the cattle kraal).

The Cabinet somehow did not think that Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa’s plan for the flag to be a symbol of “national unity” would attract any criticism as our economy implodes and children starve.

They, and the whole of Nathi Python’s Flying Circus, would have been taken aback by the tsunami of outrage which the plan generated.

Given that his boss, President Cyril Ramaphosa, is to “inspect” service delivery on Friday in Mpumalanga – and take questions at an imbizo – it is clear why Mthethwa quickly changed tack to say there will now be a “review” of the project.

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Ramaphosa clearly doesn’t like to field tricky questions. The whole debacle shows, yet again, that the ANC is increasingly divorced from reality and how our people are actually living.

The party would do well to remember that Marie Antoinette’s famous “let them eat cake” words came just before the French monarchy was violently overthrown.