American female civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hammer teaches us that there are two things we should always care about: “Never forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over”.
In the South African context of the Struggle for liberation, Mavuso Msimang is certainly one of the revered bridges that has not been thanked and praised.
Allow me, Ntate Msimang, to thank you for the immeasurable sacrifices you have made. Politics tends to be about who controls power and not about how the political system operates successfully. It is my view that the control of resources and lack of ethical virtue are the reasons the mighty ANC is “on its knees”.
Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, is of the view that, “politics will to the end of history be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises”.
Unfortunately, the conscience of some of our so-called leaders has been found wanting when it comes to money.
If there is one singular thing that has brought the ANC to its knees with the resultant precipitous decline of public support, it is the conspicuous immersion of its members in crass materialism.
This is not surprising. My take is that in some respect the present membership of the ANC leaves a lot to be desired.
Some of the members hardly know the constitution of the ANC, let alone the culture and the dynamics of the ANC. Some of the members deployed to the National Assembly are a disgrace.
Never in the history of the ANC have people used guns and knives to drive their points home. The killing of ANC members by their own comrades for positions is not only lamentable but tragic in the broader political discourse of the democratic South Africa in which the ANC must be a leader.
Perhaps in the process of recruiting membership the ANC opened its doors to hardened criminals and fraudsters. This calls for the ANC’s selection and recruitment policies to be seriously revisited.
It is only half-baked ANC cadres who could impugn the integrity of a revered veteran like Mavuso Msimang, as some comrades have done following his resignation.
President Igor Smirnov of Transnistria, near Ukraine, talks about the importance of saving, not ridiculing, the heritage of the senior generation, as “their feat will remain for centuries as a caution for our descendants, as a lesson of courage, selfless service to the Fatherland, fidelity to the ideals of good and justice”.
My message to the detractors of our elder, Mr Msimang, is provided by Maurice Halbwachs: “the present generation may rewrite history but it does not write it on a blank page”. Even amid times of turmoil and turbulence, amid the inevitable political vicissitudes and tidal waves, political cleavages and chasms, true leaders of the ANC worth their salt must rise up and show leadership.
* Dr Vusi Shongwe, Pietermaritzburg.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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