Thumbs up to ANC on its perfect disintegration plan

Dear ANC, keep up the good work. You have a good story to tell: about how things fall apart and can’t be put back together again.

Like Humpty Dumpty who had a great fall, the ANC is headed one way: phansi! Your disintegration plan is perfect.

The proposal to align the tenure of the ANC presidency with that of the country’s president is a stroke of destructive genius.

The five-year term of an ANC president will now coincide with that of the South African president, ensuring Jacob Zuma keeps both jobs until the 2019 elections.

He will have an extra two years as ANC president. Fantastic. Opposition parties could not have hoped for better.

There could be no surer way of guaranteeing the ANC loses power. By 2019, voters will be even more gatvol of the corrupt Zuptas.

Zuma, who has divided the ANC, must please be allowed to continue this nation-saving task. In the past week, he further split the Cabinet, the ANC’s national executive committee and the party.

He did so by in effect endorsing ex-wife Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as his successor, and by falsely claiming there was no tradition in the party that the deputy president should succeed the president.

A Google fact-check on how many ANC deputies became president disproves his assertion.

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By putting the boot into Cyril Ramaphosa, Zuma alienated a chunk of support. Good work. That’s the way. Divide and misrule.

By favouring Dlamini-Zuma over Baleka Mbete, the most senior woman in the ANC, the president upset another support base.

Note that Mbete says she has been “approached by many party structures”. Should we believe her? Perhaps not.

Remember the Moldenhauer Commission said her 1997 driver’s licence was fraudulent? She lied about that.

In 2013, the New York law firm Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison further dented her reputation.

It found “credible evidence” that the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act had been violated when Mbete’s stake in a Gold Fields empowerment deal had been increased to R28.6 million. Far from disqualifying her, this solidified her position in a party where self-enrichment is a leadership trait.

More recently, Mbete has shown she can’t control the National Assembly. Yet she wants to run the country? Voters are not that stupid.

They won’t “recognise” her as president. She must pay the price for being Zuma’s number one protector in parliament.

The fact that she is touted as a potential president is symptomatic of the party’s sickness. The ANC succession race is a free-for-all, despite attempts to shut down debate.

The supposedly tolerant “broad church” approach has given way to a disorderly scramble, spurred on by last year’s election results, which cut access to billions in public funds. The network of patronage has shrunk, causing panic.

There are no policy debates about genuine solutions to problems of poverty, unemployment, education and healthcare. Instead, we have rhetoric about expropriation and radical economic transformation.

When thieves fall out, they fight each other to realise where they are headed. It’s downhill from here.

No escape, no happy ending for the ANC. But Mzansi will be better off.

DA city councillor for Joburg Martin Williams

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