Removing Zuma doesn’t fix the deeper ANC issues

The adage “a fish rots from the head” is as old as the hills. Frantic to get rid of the wrecking ball president, the ANC, together with big business, is rumoured to have concocted an exit strategy that would free the party and the country from the ogre ruling us.

A figure of R2 billion is being thrown about as a buyout to make Zuma disappear.

If Julius Malema is to be believed – and he is often not wrong about his former handlers – Zuma has already secured a safe place in Dubai, should he be asked to leave as a quid pro quo for R2 billion.

This is small change for someone who has used his pecunious cronies to secrete billions out of the country by means foul and fouler.

The Bell Pottinger saga demonstrates how deep the tentacles of corruption are embedded in the fabric of this country.

Hired as a PR company to do the president’s bidding, they are nothing but respectable mercenaries. For Lindiwe Sisulu, Zuma’s honourable exit is necessary to keep the ANC together.

“Unity at all cost” has been the driving force that keeps the ANC together through all kinds of dramas, divisions and tipping points.

But why is a split in the ANC viewed as ominous for its members? Why must this network of black monopoly capitalists be knit together for life at our expense?

The answer lies in Paul Trewhela’s recent account of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s visit to the Moyikwa family in Grahamstown to express her condolences on the passing of former MK member Sindile Solomon Moyikwa, 59.

While she hailed him as a freedom fighter, she failed to acknowledge Moyika’s five years of severe torture in Angola’s notorious Quatro camps for opposing the ANC’s repressive and undemocratic regime in exile.

Involved in a mutiny against the paranoid leadership, Moyika suffered brutal attacks under ANC command.

Upon his return to South Africa, he and his ilk were treated with grudging respect, consigned to the lower ranks of liberation heroes simply to silence their voices about experiences abroad.

Many MK members and even those in the current government had gone through hell for daring to oppose the high command in exile, but are sworn to secrecy by a kind of pact that prevents the ANC from disintegrating.

Citing the Stuart Commission Report, Trewhela confirms that the ANC’s security department, Mkobodo, had become “totally isolated and alienated from the general cadreship”.

“Their power and privileges, their lifestyles, their image and methods of work had placed this department apart from, and in appearance, hostile to those living in camps.

“Relations between administration and rank-and-file were described as being of ‘master and servant’.”

Trewhela provides insights into the ANC’s unstoppable obsession with power, dominance, and greed, even among those who hate each other.

Their unity is founded upon “a power structure dominated by ‘living within the lie’” – an aura inscribed on the faces of the former disciples of Thabo Mbeki.

Their loss of power has made them look rather pathetic in the face of Zuma’s rapaciousness. As disgruntled as they are internally, they keep the laager intact.

It ensures not only access to economic power and future privilege, but hides the lies of the past that are deeply buried beneath the compound. Instead of excising the rot, only the tumour will be removed by removing Zuma.

The next generation of leaders will contain the cancer. That’s all they know.

FILE PICTURE: Rhoda Kadalie, anti-apartheid activist.