The time has arrived for black people to stop romanticising the ANC and what it stands for…If I have to make a choice between the DA, MKP and the EFF, I will choose the DA any day. – Sipho Masondo is a News24 investigative journalist.
Sipho Masondo | Between the DA, MKP and the EFF, I would choose the DA any day
Sipho Masondo
ANC supporters hold a coffin aloft representing EFF, Action SA and the DA at the party’s last rally before the 29 May elections at FNB stadium, Johannesburg. (Photo: Alfonso Nqunjana/News24)
With some black ideologues criticising the ANC for entering the GNU with the DA, Sipho Masondo argues that their ideas are premised on the false and erroneous belief that the ANC cares about black people.
Over the past two weeks, I have been enjoying watching black ideologues having a meltdown over the ANC’s pragmatic and practical decision to choose to partner with the DA, as opposed to the EFF and the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, in the government of national unity (GNU).
These are unchartered waters for everyone. Even in our wildest dreams, no soothsayer – not even one with the most prolific crystal balls – could have foretold that after the 2024 general election, the ANC would need a coalition partner, let alone the DA, to form a GNU.
You see, my concern with the black ideologues, who want the ANC to reject the DA in favour of a coalition with the EFF and Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, is that they are labouring under several misguided impressions.
The ANC doesn’t care about black people
One such false impression is that the ANC cares about black people’s struggles. They parrot the dishonest and mistaken refrain, common among the party’s leaders and within its rank and file, that the former liberation movement is the only organisation that can end all of South Africa’s woes, including racism, sexism, joblessness, poverty and inequality. They contend that the ANC is the only political party with the wherewithal to create a vibrant economy.
As such, the theory goes that if the ANC partners with other “black parties”, such as the EFF and the MKP, they will be able to transform black people’s economic conditions and improve their social standing in society so that they are on par with their white fellow countrymen.
Again, all these ideas are premised on the false and erroneous belief that the ANC, in particular, and other black parties with similar ideological outlooks in general, care about black people.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Let me be clear:
The ANC doesn’t care about black people, and the party’s leaders don’t lose sleep over native people’s struggles in life.
The ANC has been in power for 30 years, and if the party were remotely concerned about changing black people’s material conditions, we wouldn’t have an unemployment rate north of 30%.
If one visits rural villages in Limpopo, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Mpumalanga, you will be confronted with mud schools and long-drop toilets. In extreme cases, children don’t even have mud classes, they learn under trees and use the bush to relieve themselves.
Who can forget the decade-old horrific death of five-year-old Michael Komape, who drowned in a pit toilet near Polokwane in Limpopo?
On social media, I’ve seen video clips of children swimming across rivers to get to school.
That all these are happening so many years into the democratic dispensation is an indictment and is proof that the ANC doesn’t care about black people’s struggles. There is no excuse for any of this other than that the ANC lacks determination and resolve to do what is right for black people.
Sipho Masondo | Election aftermath: The DA’s struggle to gain trust of black voters
The question that the ideologues conveniently or deliberately forget to ask is how did the ANC, a party that won more than 60% of the vote in the four elections between 1994 and 2014, get to a point where it needs coalition partners – much less the DA – to form a government? The answers are in plain sight.
Stop romanticising the ANC
Did the ANC think it would go unpunished by voters when its comrades facilitated the repurposing and hallowing of state-owned companies?
How did the ANC think voters would respond and react to unrelenting load shedding between 2018 and early 2024?
Who could forget the gory details, revealed at the State Capture Inquiry, of how Dudu Myeni, who died late last week, turned South African Airways into her personal fiefdom.
We now look back and laugh at how a feudal and imperious baffoon like Hlaudi Motsoeneng turned public institutions such as the SABC into a joke. South Africa became a laughingstock as the ANC let Zuma allow his Gupta friends to order directors-general and ministers around like small boys.
Something had to give and that’s why we are where we are today.
The time has arrived for black people to stop romanticising the ANC and what it stands for.
Of course, the party played a significant role in the liberation of this country. But that was a different ANC. The ANC of today is different.
The ANC stopped caring about black people when it elected Zuma as its president in its seminal and watershed 52nd National Conference in Polokwane in 2007. The ANC, as we know it, is gone. It has been replaced by a parasitic entity led by greedy and voracious kleptocrats.
ANC-EFF-MKP union will not lead to renewal
The ideologues’ opposition to a coalition with the DA seems to imply that a partnership with the EFF and the MK Party will return the ANC to the straight and narrow.
Do we have any objective indicators suggesting that a coalition with the EFF and the MKP will help the ANC turn over a new leaf? I would argue that there are none. If anything, not only will a union between the EFF and the MKP make the ANC’s implosion to be sure and certain, but it would also accelerate it.
Lest we forget, the EFF is led by Julius Malema, a man who was heavily implicated in the collapsing of the Limpopo province in the early 2010s. Malema’s party is also funded by shady and shadowy businessmen, whom until now, Malema has refused to identify.
Equally, it should not be forgotten that the MKP is led by a man who allowed the state to spend R250 million to build him his sprawling compound in Nkandla and saw nothing wrong with it. Further, Zuma saddled South Africa with state capture and is yet to account for it.
In light of the above, what makes anyone think that a coalition between the ANC, EFF, and the MKP will be good, not only for the former liberation movement but also for the country?
If we strip the ideologues’ arguments to the bone, they are simply saying that they would rather be led by a conglomerate of “black parties”, at all costs, than risk a coalition featuring the DA – a party that largely represents the interests of white minorities.
I wrote last week in this column that considering South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history, black people’s apprehension towards the DA is fair, reasonable, and understandable. But since the ANC would be the leader of the GNU, it is equally fair to conclude that the party of Nelson Mandela, including other “black parties” such as the IFP in the GNU, will block the DA should the organisation attempt to reverse transformation.
So, the ideologues’ reasoning that the DA will reintroduce apartheid and cancel redress policies is unfounded and without basis.
I have my own discomforts with the DA, and I have documented them well in previous columns. But for the reasons I have argued above, I fully support the ANC’s decision to form the GNU with the DA and the IFP.
If I have to make a choice between the DA, MKP and the EFF, I will choose the DA any day. – Sipho Masondo is a News24 investigative journalist.
Martin Plaut 