Tragic fading of a liberation movement

ANOTHER VOICE

- LORENZO A. DAVIDS

THE ANC president, Cyril Ramaphosa, delivered the organisation’s January 8 Statement on Saturday in 30-degree summer heat at Moruleng Stadium in the North West province. From the very beginning, something felt profoundly wrong.

It was not even the halfhearted “Viva ANC, viva’ chants. It was the contrast. It was the spectacle of the poor, seated in their poverty under the unforgiving midday sun, facing a stage crowded with billionaires expecting rapturous applause. That applause never came. Instead, there was silence - heavy, unmistakable, and deeply revealing.

After desiccated, shopworn speeches of congratulations from its alliance partners marking the ANC’s 114th anniversary, it became clear that the party’s collective reservoirs were empty. The revolutionary spirit that once animated the movement had evaporated. These choreographed gatherings, designed to manufacture enthusiasm for a party whose “promises record” now rivals the failure rate of New Year's resolutions, instead expose the depth of the ANC’s political and moral exhaustion. It serves only to showcase the hole the ANC has sunk into.

There were, as always, the “soldiers” in military uniforms - their presence increasingly incoherent in a constitutional democracy. Consider for a moment if the right-wing crowd in South Africa dragged out its uniformed paramilitary ancients and put them on stage whenever one of their events takes place. Most politicians on the left would lose their pea-soup and demand it be sanctioned. Why, then, is a ruling party’s private military theatre normalised and indulged in our constitutional democracy?