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‘Operation Protect Zuma’ at all costs: The ANC’s obsession with one man

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Mmusi Maimane is leader of Build One SA.

The ANC today under Jacob Zuma simply obeys the instructions of the Secretary General without even thinking. Its resolution is to do and say what its leader does and says, unquestionably. And so it is blindly becoming a machine that supports and defends one person, rather than defending South Africa from his wrongs.

I come away from meetings with international businesspeople and investors rather underwhelmed these days. Not for their lack of creative economic stimulus propositions, but because they speak in one unanimous voice on the state of South Africa today. They say in unison that we are leaderless, and are fast diluting the rule of law.

They say that to approach South Africa is to approach a minefield of corruption and unpredictability. And what’s worse, they say, is that the man at the very top not only condones it, but practices it himself while his party protects him blindly.

In any organisation, any conglomerate, any society there exist standards upon which decisions and actions arise. These are the values and the ethos of the team and its members. These are driven by the leader, who is in a position to set the tone and cascade it down to those who rally around. And they rally around as they identify in themselves the same values, ethos and standards.

That is an exercise of questioning oneself. It is an exercise of critique upon one’s own values and how those values match up.

But there does exist another model. That is the organisation wherein what the leader at the top says and does, others who rally around are expected or required to do and say too.

This has become painfully true of the ANC today under Jacob Zuma. Its resolution is to obey the instructions of the Secretary General without even thinking. Its resolution is to do and say what its leader does and says, unquestionably. And so it is blindly becoming a machine that supports and defends one person, rather than defending South Africa from his wrongs.

It is indeed sad for our democracy that we no longer can expect independent and reasoned work from so many in the ANC. Their mantra is to follow a line that they have been told to follow, and to do everything to guard their leaders, and to guard the president from ever answering difficult questions. This is what Gwede Mantashe means when he says that Parliament must not be allowed to ‘embarrass’ the president. He means that Parliament must not be allowed to do its job, and he means that the ANC will ensure that this happens.

This speaks to the ANC approach to weaken our institutions, one at a time, until they are not strong enough to expose ANC failures. It speaks to an ANC that wants Parliament, the Public Protector, the Hawks, Crime Intelligence, the Prosecuting Authority, the SABC, the Judiciary, ICASA and all others to be weak, to be ineffectual and to have no teeth to stand up to the ANC and its president.

But what the ANC is really doing, is to weaken our very democracy. For democracy relies on strong institutions. Yet the ANC wants only to see weak institutions.

Our institutions must be strong; they must have might. They must be fearless and must stand up to excesses of power whenever they occur. They must be independent, and free to do their work independently.

Our institutions must be filled with bold and brave people. People like Thuli Madonsela, who has served this country and this democracy with fearlessness. Yet the ANC argues that while the institution of the Public Protector is a good thing, the person in the office today is bad. They describe her as being “of the wrong character”. It is more than irony that the one institution which has found grand-scale corruption against the president, is the one that the ANC most ridicules.

Without strong and fearless people in the offices of our institutions, the institutions are nothing but four walls and a computer. So the institutions really are made up of the mandate given to them in law, and the strength of the people in their offices to carry out that mandate. It can’t be either/or, as the ANC wants.

Just like President Jacob Zuma, cannot be separated from the Office of President that he holds, each and every day of the year. The ANC cannot separate Jacob Zuma the man from Jacob Zuma the president in order to set him free from the sins of the office that he holds. Yet they tried exactly this in the Nkandla Committee last week, trying to suggest that the Office of President should repay the millions taken from the taxpayer at Nkandla.

The fact is that President Jacob Zuma oversaw the corruption at Nkandla. Not the Office of President, or the Presidency – it was President Jacob Zuma himself who personally visited the site many times and received progress reports many times as South African tax-payer rands were ploughed into his private home.

And so we called strongly in the Nkandla Committee for President Zuma to appear before it to come and account. As the person, and the institution, he absolutely has to account and come clean with South Africa.

The ANC vigorously blocked President Zuma appearing at the committee. And now, the Nkandla Ad Hoc Committee might as well meet in the boardroom of Luthuli House.

The risk of the ANC strategy to separate institutions from the people who hold office, is that when they are separated, no single person is accountable. So accountability disappears entirely.

It is a classic ANC distraction. If we blame the office, the person can escape. Or if we cast aspersions on the person, we can’t be seen to undermine the office. Frankly, the logic is to defend the ANC at all costs, smear the names of those who show the governing party up, rubbish the institutions that find fault in the ANC and separate person and office so that no-one is accountable.

Right now, at this moment in our history, we face an undeniable truth: The removal of Jacob Zuma from the Presidency is key to South Africa’s revival.

We face undeniable uphill challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. These are all-encompassing. We face dismal economic growth. We are all-but under stagflation already. We face a crumbling constitutional order, cast aside to protect one man. We face chronic infrastructure neglect, as the water crisis in Gauteng has proved. We face irrational future plans, like a Nuclear deal for over R1 trillion, which will only serve us in 12 years time when our energy crisis is today.

President Zuma distracts South Africa from the business of today. He hogs our front pages with scandal after scandal: Nkandla, Arms Deal, Bribes, Eiffel Towers. He keeps us from making our issues the real issue. He is, in fact, a log in our eye.

South Africa expects a president who can lead and boldly take us forward. It expects to find comfort in the fearless progression toward a better future. It expects a governing party that holds South Africa and the constitution above all else. It expects leadership, but all we have is an empty ship.

Our offer to President Zuma, to ‘lead, or step aside’ is fast waning.

Mr President, show us that you can lead, or really, step aside. DM

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