The ANC's Priorities: My Response

The ANC's lekgotla, held over the weekend, outlined specific tasks in the six priority areas identified by the ANC’s NGC:

• Firstly, to fix local government and improve basic services

• Secondly, to speed up economic transformation and to engender inclusive growth and job creation

• Thirdly, to wage war on crime and corruption and tackle GBVF as a National Disaster

• Fourthly, to build a South Africa that belongs to all through the National Dialogue and through commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Constitution

• Fifthly, to make organisational renewal visible and irreversible

• Sixthly, to build a better Africa and a better world.

Firstly, the ANC couldn’t fix local government in 30 years; in fact, it has destroyed it. It will never fix it. Local Government cannot be fixed any more; the infrastructure, the expertise and the institutional capacity to do it has been destroyed by BBBEE, employment equity, corruption and cadre deployment.

Secondly. Well, in a nutshell, you want to double down on, and intensify the implementation of the policies that have caused the collapse in the first place. Ya, right, that will work out fine; it will deliver intensification of the destruction.

Thirdly, how can you wage war on crime and corruption if the ANC itself is a vehicle for self-enrichment and tenderpreneurship, and if we have heard confirmation from the top bras of the Police that Ministers are in the pockets of crime syndicates and so are almost all police officers in Gauteng? (O, by the way, something you clearly have not yet learned: To CALL (declare) something a “National Disaster” has not actually solved that issue).

Fourthly, nobody except Ramaphosa and Roelf Meyer actually want the “National Dialogue.” We already have it: Its called journalism and debate, and there’s a lot of it in SA. “National Consensus” doesn’t mean we all of a sudden agree that racial discrimination in law against White South Africans is all right because the victims thereof are a small, tiny minority of the country’s population. Why do you want to celebrate the Constitution of a country with the highest unemployment and inequality in the world? Why celebrating something that has authorised brutal discrimination such as BBBEE and EE?

Fifthly, I know knowing about your “organisational renewal”, except to say that: (1) I’ve heard it, or something similar, since the early 2000s, and every year the ANC just collapses deeper and deeper into a vehicle for state capture and corruption, with service delivery and care for the people deteriorating further-and-further. (2) A “political education program” will not solve your problems; just like the obsession with “accreditation”, and the billions paid over to politically connected cadres for “training” have only worsened the state of knowledge and competence in the country, and has certainly not improved anything. (And, by the way, cannot teach anyone to be ethical).

Sixthly, your international relations are not based on “a better world”, or “promoting human rights”, but on the  litmus test of whether an event or action of another country or global institution is pro – or anti-American; if its pro, its bad, and if its anti, its good.

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