Oops! The ANC makes another mistake

It’s the kind of plea that a helpless father might in a different, more servile era, have written to his daughter’s abusive spouse.

In essence, it beseeches the cad not to abuse the battered woman whom he professes to love. Despite the high hopes expressed in the heartfelt entreaty, the tone is resigned.

The writer is going through the motions, expecting to be disappointed, yet again. What I’m talking about is the plea that the eponymous Ahmed Kathrada Foundation issued last week on the occasion of the KwaZulu-Natal floods.

It is addressed to the government the foundation supports and, as is proper for a supplicant, the foundation remembers to say “please”. “Please do not repeat the Covid experience – don’t steal,” is the headline.

“Let us use the rebuilding programme to start a new process of transparent, cost-effective and participatory governance. Trust is earned’ … and this is an opportunity for the government to start earning it by doing what is in the interest of the people and not for the bank accounts of a few.”

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These plaintive sentiments have since been echoed by thousands of ordinary South Africans.

We all say pretty much the same thing as the Kathrada Foundation, without reflecting how outlandishly inappropriate it is that a nation’s inhabitants have to go on their knees and beg their government not to steal their money.

Anywhere else in the world there would be an angry kickback. The scum would be out on their taxpayer-padded backsides at the very next election.

Instead, in South Africa, we touch our forelocks, bob our heads and wait for Jesus to arrive. What’s wrong with us? It’s not as if the ANC fat cats are listening.

The moment the KZN emergency relief started flowing, the cadres had their piggy snouts in the trough.

No sooner had an enormous stock of donated foodstuffs and clothing been assembled at Durban’s Virginia Airport than eThekwini municipal officials pitched up to take them way for “delivery”.

Vanessa Wright, chair of the local ratepayers’ association who was coordinating the distribution, had to park her car in front of the municipal convoy to prevent the unasked for assistance.

After initially insisting everything was kosher, eThekwini conceded it was “a mistake” to have tried to spirit off the supplies.

Oops! Just two days earlier, announcing that R1 billion had been set aside by the province for flood relief, KZN premier Sihle Zikalala said the ANC had “learned a lot” from the looting of Covid relief funds.

This time, “no amount of corruption, maladministration or fraud will be tolerated”. The following day with water supplies cut off in much of the province, Zikalala summoned a home delivery, a whole water tanker just for the use of his family.

When the video went viral, Zikalala at first claimed the footage had been digitally manipulated. Only when the testimony of his neighbours became incontestable, did he come clean.

It was “a mistake”, apologised Zikalala and it will “never happen again”.

Oops! What organisations like the Kathrada Foundation are achieving with their well-meaning but effete interventions is the opposite of what they intend.

By pandering to the ANC, they are not advancing democracy but retarding it. It is clear from the degree of public scorn that greeted President Cyril Ramaphosa’s and Zikalala’s promises on emergency flood relief that no one believes a word they say.

That’s a dangerous position for a political party – and a country – to be in.