Truth to Power
This weekend the African National Congress will vote for the party’s new leadership in their elective conference in Mangaung, a meeting that has been preceded by much political manoeuvring and internal polemic.
“Where is the solidarity with the poor when the chase for tenders takes precedence over feeding, housing and educating the poor?”
In electing the ANC’s president the membership has a grave responsibility to the nation, because the party’s president is also the presumptive candidate for South Africa’s presidency in 2014.
In the light of the ANC’s electoral dominance, this means that this weekend will see the appointment of the man who very likely will lead South Africa until 2019.
The experience of the Zuma government since 2009 would suggest that the ANC membership’s decision at its electoral conference in Polokwane five years ago was not an unqualified triumph of wisdom.
The government has failed in many key areas though it has succeeded in some others and the ANC is no less divided now than it was in 2007, with many of President Zuma’s key allies then having turned against him with venomous resentment.
The national democratic revolution, to use the ANC’s language, is devouring itself. The party lacks cohesion in purpose and, indeed, a coherent vision to define such a purpose.
Widespread service delivery protests and labour unrest, culminating in August’s Marikana massacre, articulate a deep-seated frustration with the ANC government even among those who perceive no viable electoral alternative to the ruling party.
While Mr Zuma correctly points to accomplishments in the domain of service delivery and rightly counsels that not all objectives in uplifting the poor can be met immediately, the government is failing to stand in solidarity with the poor.
Where is the solidarity with the poor when the ANC and its alliance partners expend much of their energy on internecine battles for position instead of addressing the issues affecting the poor in ways other than repeatedly inflammatory rhetoric that is designed not so much to articulate the aspirations of the poor as to score political points?
Where is the solidarity with the poor when the state is diverting funds into the financing of extravagant real estate developments at and around the president’s private residence, in a region marked by some of South Africa’s most dire poverty?
Where is the solidarity with the poor when education officials fail dismally in the distribution of textbooks to schools and the administration of other education services in some of the country’s most deprived areas those which particularly need a well-educated future generation?
Where is the solidarity with the poor when the chase for tenders takes precedence over feeding, housing and educating the poor?
Where is the solidarity with the poor when the government is expending resources to find ways of throttling the freedoms of civil society and the press, and the independence of the judiciary, so that corruption in state affairs which always harms the poor the most may remain uncovered?
Where is the solidarity with the poor when the president and his party are more outraged by controversial pieces of art, newspaper cartoons and other perceived personal slights than they are by children going hungry?
As Bishop Barry Wood, the liaison bishop for Justice & Peace, told The Southern Cross recently, the people are angry. He pointed out that as poverty increases, a few privileged rich seem to have no spirit of sharing or working out strategies to bridge the widening gap. We all need to make a preferential option for the poor and work out strategies of how to implement this option.
The Catholic Church in South Africa has decided to assume some of the responsibility for providing concrete leadership, and is presently working on a vision statement, Community in Service of Reconciliation, Justice and Peace, intended to mobilise the Church to action.
Whichever way the votes go at Mangaung this weekend, South Africa will be well served by a Catholic Church that will fearlessly and consistently speak truth to power.
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