RECENTLY, two university vice-chancellors showed the kind of bold leadership they knew would make them unpopular with the government. The men to whom I refer are Prof Jonathan Jansen from the University of the Free State and Dr Max Price of the University of Cape Town (UCT).
I commend Price for taking a public and principled stand in support of Chumani Maxwele, brutally arrested in Cape Town for allegedly showing the presidential cavalcade the finger. In a recent Sunday Times column, Price reminds the government that his protest and that on his campus comes from the same lineage of protests that made UCT’s Jameson Steps famous in the struggle against apartheid.
Maxwele’s arrest demonstrates that the more beleaguered our president and the African National Congress (ANC) become, the more their fascist tendencies will come to the fore, and the arrest of an innocent jogger portends something deeply sinister.
It has often been said the ANC would display worrying tendencies at the prospect of losing at the polls. And this flagrant abuse of power against the weak shows how near to the surface the Quatro brutality lurks.
The hauling of Maxwele into the car, the covering of his head with a black bag, and the search of his home harks back to the “kragdadigheid” era of PW Botha. And in all of this, the Human Rights Commission has been silent. So co- opted and pleased are the deployed cadres that they no longer hold the government accountable.
Not only was the arrest a hideous abuse of power, it was also a gross violation of Maxwele’s human rights. It was an infringement of his rights to freedom and security of the person; of his rights to dignity, privacy and freedom of expression.
The silence — except for the UCT protests — around this case shows how docile we have become as a public. ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, a recipient of state tenders, becomes an instant millionaire and flagrantly displays his wealth by using the stadium in Polokwane to celebrate his birthday, and all we do is gasp in disbelief.
We don’t need lifestyle audits; we need criminal investigations and arrests of those who steal taxpayers’ money. And, to quote Price, “we must mobilise and we must hold politicians to account…. We must demand upright citizenship in our leaders, in public servants and in every person who lives in our country…. That is also why it is so important to reject corruption, the abuse of power, and public officials’ lies and unaccountability.”
The Maxwele case is directly related to the recent Eskom electricity tariff hike, from which the ANC is set to benefit to the tune of millions of rand — though we are silent about this too. Whether or not we vote for the ANC, we, the public, are putting millions into the ANC’s coffers, unwittingly supporting a party we do not even vote for.
Referring to the fact that the ANC’s Chancellor House funding arm stands to make more than a billion rand from its partnership with Hitachi in the contracts for the Medupi power station, former Financial Mail editor Nigel Bruce remarked incredulously: “Never was thieving so simple.”
This deal, by cosmic coincidence, is costing 30% more than equivalent units built elsewhere and Valli Moosa was, conveniently, chairman of Eskom and a member of the ANC fundraising committee at the time the contract was signed. He failed to mention that major contracts, tenders and black economic empowerment (BEE) deals are awarded on an understanding that the ANC gets its slice for the elite.
An uncontested Sunday Times front page lead on March 9 2008 revealed how the party had received its cut of R9m, through businessman Saki Macozoma, in the R1,5bn Stanlib BEE deal.
The ANC’s theft of billions of rand, which could otherwise have been used to uplift the poor, has had catastrophic consequences for service delivery. The party has countered the consequent protests by setting up an unsustainable social grant system derived from a rapidly shrinking tax base. A-loota continua! The vampire state!
- Kadalie is a human rights activist based in Cape Town.