Give South Africa Some Hope!

by Editor · April 20, 2016

Many South Africans owe Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng an apology after greeting his appointment as chief justice of the Constitutional Court in 2011 with much cynicism.

After leading the court’s unanimous decision that President Jacob Zuma and parliament had failed to uphold the Constitution in the upgrading of the president’s private homestead at Nkandla, nobody can accuse Justice Mogoeng of being the ANC’s lapdog, as a cartoon published at the time of his appointment predicted.

Of the injuries which the presidency of Mr Zuma has inflicted upon South Africa, one of the most grave is the lack of confidence in the public institutions which are supposed to serve us.

It is an indictment of the government that the Constitutional Court’s decision had to be hailed not only as correct and self-evident, but also, without undue hyperbole, as a victory for democracy.

Too many of Mr Zuma’s appointments — and, it must be noted, also of those installed during the Thabo Mbeki presidency—have revealed themselves to be acting not in the interests of the nation, but as agents invested with the task of protecting a mendacious presidency and the narrow interests of the African National Congress.

Frequently neither Mr Zuma nor the government nor parliament nor the ANC made much of an effort to hide its agenda as it appointed, approved or deployed individuals of dubious qualification and character who were tasked with executing partisan agendas, regardless of the damage they would cause.

Too often such individuals were ethically compromised already at the time of their appointment. They proceeded to undermine institutions they were supposed to strengthen, such as the National Prosecuting Authority or the South African Broadcasting Corporation, to the extent that the public has lost confidence in them.

It is necessary to note, however, that some Zuma-era appointments have acted with the highest integrity and honour — Justice Mogoeng and Public Protector Thuli Madonsela are two prominent examples of this.

Nonetheless, the president and the ANC have routinely acted with impunity in appointing unsuitable and unqualified individuals to key positions with no regard for the welfare of the country. For this they must be held morally accountable.

The Machiavellian methods employed by the Zuma regime in the service of venal misrule were exposed by the damning Constitutional Court judgment, but they go much deeper than Nkandla.

After the Constitutional Court judgment, President Zuma appeared on television in a bid to absolve himself of blame for the Nkandla debacle, and to offer an apology so qualified as to be meaningless.

At face value, Mr Zuma seemed to confess to the nation that he is clueless as to what is going on in his government and on his personal property, and that he is incompetent in following basic procedures in accordance with the law. He admitted to listening to shoddy advice by incompetent people whose wisdom he naively trusted. He conceded that he is a poor judge of policy, procedure and character, and demonstrated that he has no grasp of ethics.

This was Mr Zuma’s positive spin — a sober assessment of his presidency is much more damning.

South Africa is expected to believe that Mr Zuma is competent to be president of the country. His record is not persuasive that he is, neither in terms of administration nor of ethics.

The premature departure of Mr Zuma surely is now necessary and, at some point after the municipal elections, inevitable.

But when Mr Zuma eventually goes, South Africa will not be liberated from its many social problems, nor will it spontaneously redress our economic woes, which are in many ways linked to international causes which are out of the government’s control.

However, Mr Zuma’s retirement—and that, one may hope, of some of those who have compromised themselves by aggressively doing his bidding—will give the government, parliament and the ANC an opportunity to purge themselves of the stench of corruption and maladministration they have been party to.

This will be an opportunity that does not present itself too often. The conversation within the deeply divided ANC and in the public forum must already begin to shape a clear vision of good governance which might give our distressed country some hope and healing.