It is alarming that South Africans’ best response to corruption, state capture and maladministration by the ANC government is to bleat timidly that something must be done. In saying so, we believe we have taken a stand and, in having thus supposedly condemned the government’s unspeakable atrocities, proclaim that our work here is done.
Really? How has that worked for the country? We have bleated for decades and now even those in the ANC who have been implicated in some of the worst of the crimes have joined the chorus, notably accused-in-chief President Jacob Zuma.
Consider the president’s hypocritical ejaculation in his January 8 address, in which he acknowledges that corruption is a problem and urges public servants to "live a life of humility, integrity and selfless service to the people".
The US’s top buffoon, President Donald Trump, could not have done a better job of presenting an alternative truth.
In a report by Bloomberg writers Mike Cohen and Sam Mkokeli (carried by Business Day), they quote professor of public affairs Mashupye Maserumule as saying the "problem seems to be getting worse".
If this wasn’t so true and so tragic, it might have been a hilarious understatement. And then there is this by the prince of understatement, Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa: "We must face the reality that much of the factionalism in our movement is rooted in a competition for access to resources."
The trouble with these statements is that the effects of the ANC’s disastrous rule and Ramaphosa’s naïveté and Zuma’s arrogant lies are known. We shall probably devote many years to uncovering and prosecuting the extent of the ANC’s malfeasance, but we have long since gone beyond the point at which we must proclaim in righteous indignation that "something must be done". And the longer we bleat ineffectually without acting, the more complicit we become.
Where were they when the arms deal was exposed as a corrupt and grotesque waste of public funds?
It means we are becoming increasingly aligned with those so-called factions within the ANC who, now that the writing is on the wall as it were, expediently claim to side with the righteous. Where were they when the arms deal was exposed as a corrupt and grotesque waste of public funds? Is it not reasonable to assume when our corrupt health services collapsed and our rotten education system turned young South Africans into zombies that they too were beneficiaries of the proceeds of crime?
When ANC spokesman Zizi Kodwa says SA has "never seen the influence of money like we have seen in the recent past" and that "big business and people with fat pockets will want to capture a leader or the whole leadership for their own selfish interests", he is shifting the blame for the corruption and thievery by ANC members to the abstract idea of capitalism or greedamong some of the party’s leaders.
He makes it clear that the party as a collective will not accept responsibility for the various crimes of its prominent members.
Collective responsibility is, of course, a fascist favourite in the way the Nazis blamed all Jews for poverty in Germany, but it is appropriate to hold to account every individual ANC member who remains loyal to the party now that the facts are known. This applies equally to all citizens.
Anyone, whether they are an ANC member or not, who does not distance themselves from the party is, through tacit approval, complicit in its crimes. It is no different from holding to account those National Party members who remained loyal to the party after the apartheid atrocities committed in their name had been exposed.
This applies to corporate citizens in particular — first because a function of their power is influence. They will have to account for
their remiss. But the imperative to shun the ANC is most applicable to those in the private sector who continue to do business with the government.
As Sanlam, Absa and the rest of the apartheid establishment’s beneficiaries of the illegal Bankorp lifeboat are discovering, there will be a reckoning.
It was, after all, a politician no less than the president who urged the people to take a "decisive stand against those who abused their positions to further personal agendas".
That, Mr President, we shall do. Our work here is not yet done.
• Blom is a fly-fisherman who likes to write
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