Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters in Johannesburg. Picture: Michel Bega
The ANC is not a party that is leading by example and there are many examples to cite on this score.
Prior to the ANC veering off the tracks, it was a movement famous for its discipline, with its approach to anything
steeped on integrity and ethics.
Today, its disciplinary committee is almost dead and its integrity and ethics structures grapple with how to contain unbecoming behaviour by its senior members.
In any organisation, the president is the moral pillar and the chief executive officer is the face of its culture and driver of its vision.
When these two officers act contrary to what they should stand for, that organisation is as good as dead and must be liquidated or put under administration.
Such a stage has been reached with the governing party.
When an incumbent secretary-general and a former president of the party have questionable ethics, you can’t be blamed for concluding that such a party is beyond redemption.
They have become law unto themselves, or they believe they are above the law.
The ANC secretary-general showed the middle finger to the disciplinary structures of the party by refusing to subject himself to their processes to account for serious allegations of corruption hanging over his head.
The former president, who has been in and out of courts for close to two decades now facing corruption charges and possibly more charges in future, is refusing to lead by example and appear before the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.
Like the secretary-general, the ex-president emphatically shows the deputy chief justice who chairs the inquiry the middle finger.
If such senior leaders refuse to act in an exemplary fashion, the law must make examples of them.
While judges should by no means act vindictively, the law is uncompromising to those who undermine the authority of law officers, or deliberately breach the law.
The former president had played enough of his hide-and-seek game with the law and I think he has now reached a cul-de-sac.
He exhausted all his options in the past 15 years and it’s now the time for the law to be firm against him to demonstrate that nobody is above the law.
He defied Judge Raymond Zondo knowing fully well what the consequences would be.
Perhaps Zondo is not the main target, but the politician had ulterior motives to plunge this country into chaos, or to stoke a civil war.
He has nothing to lose because he has lost everything anyway. He lost at Nasrec, he lost in government and now realises he is about to lose in the courts.
As for the secretary-general, he is abusing the Nasrec compromise, where none of the two factions obtained a clear majority.
Nasrec forced the current president and his national executive committee to pursue unity and reconciliation at all costs.
The voters/citizens have no way of acting against both leaders, but their votes are able to act for them.
It’s the ANC that is going to suffer. The 2019 election results should have been a warning that the ANC’s days are numbered as a governing party.
Dropping from Thabo Mbeki’s two-thirds majority of 69.7% in 2004 to 57.5 % under Cyril Ramaphosa in the last polls should tell the ANC that the time is up for it.
Political journalist Eric Naki.
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