Daily Maverick certainly offers varied fare on its multi-meal quotidian menu. In the last week, readers have been treated to a paean of praise for South Africa by advertising executive Mike Abel, a chilling dose of reality from lawyer Judith February and a plea to the leadership of faith-based organisations to wake up and get involved in saving the country from the corrupt by Russell Pollitt, a Jesuit priest.

So good is Abel at putting a bright side on everything South African that our pig-in-a-poke current situation leaves the reader marvelling at our wondrous reality. So much lipstick is applied by him that the pig looks like Marilyn Monroe popping out of her gown for JFK’s birthday. The combination of melktert and Springbok rugby is irresistible.

February is altogether more sobering. She leads off in her Judith’s Prudence newsletter with a dark Ingrid de Kok 2008 poem “Today I do not love my country”. Referring to the gang rape in Kagiso, February reflects on a country exhausted by its own brokenness. She too invokes the Springboks by repeating Siya Kolisi’s oft-uttered words “with everything that is going on in our country…” as he accepts some new trophy.

The denunciation of the ANC government by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference is highlighted by Pollitt who complains that post-apartheid religious leaders in South Africa have, for the most part, lost their voice.

Pondering these three magnificent contributions, as one does at three in the morning, the need to raise our voices to save our country becomes ever more stridently obvious. How best to do so is the difficulty.

South Africa is a country that has needed saving frequently in the modern era. First the Dutch and then the British colonised from the south between 1652 and 1910. The Afrikaners, sick of British rule, took off in the 1830s to colonise the north of modern South Africa by eventually establishing two republics, the ZAR and the Orange Free State.

Even before the Europeans arrived, the ancestors of black South Africans were colonising the lands of the Khoi and the San, stopping at the Great Fish River because their crops would not grow in the southern winter rainfall region. All of this conquest was aimed at the exploitation of the land, its natural resources and later its minerals and diamonds.

The exploitation and subjugation of the indigenous tribes, from the San in the south to the Venda in the north, led to many wars between colonised and colonisers, including two fierce wars between Boer and Brit in which the hegemony of the British Empire was asserted at great cost in lives and lifestyles to the settlers in the Boer Republics.

In 1909 a national convention was called leading to the establishment of a new country as a dominion in the British Empire, the Union of South Africa, consisting of four provinces, in which the vote would be for whites only except in the Cape, where a qualified franchise was retained for some people of colour. The exclusion of blacks prompted the formation of the ANC in 1913.

The Union born on 31 May 1910 became a Republic on the same day in 1961 when Afrikaner nationalism re-asserted itself fully and took South Africa out of the British Empire. The new 1961 Constitution lasted some two decades before further tricameral tinkering preceded the liberation of the non-voting majority in 1994 when all residents of South Africa were allowed, for the first time, to vote in the same election.

Since then, South Africa has degenerated into a dominant party state in which an ever-weakening alliance of the ANC, the South Africa Communist Party and trade union federation Cosatu has governed with the solitary aim of pursuing their National Democratic Revolution (NDR).

The expressed purpose of the NDR is to assert hegemonic control of all levers of power in society (society, mark you, not government). This aim is achieved by the deployment of loyal cadres of the revolution to all levers of power in society, including supposedly independent institutions like the judiciary, the prosecution service and the Chapter Nine institutions.

This striving for hegemony is at odds with the tenets of the supreme law of the land, our Constitution, which acknowledges that the rule of law is supreme (which means, inter alia, that a legitimate purpose of government must be served by all decision-making in the halls of power). The separation of powers is a given and the due and proper use of checks and balances on the exercise of power should prevent hegemony.

In its policy documents discussed by the ANC at its July 2022 conference some interesting passages appear. They have been extensively quoted already. The ANC comes close to admitting its manifest failure to govern along the lines of the Constitution.

In these circumstances, it is apparent that compassionate confrontation of the corrupt in our midst is necessary and long overdue. Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of South Africa’s second democratically elected president, has dryly suggested that the NDR is simply a continuation of the colonial and apartheid eras’ exploitation of the resources with which South Africa is endowed: be it people, natural or mineral resources.

In the past, the exploitation was for the benefit of empires or Afrikaner nationalists, now it is for the benefit of the deployed cadres of the NDR. His remarks certainly explain phenomena like State Capture, covid-preneurism and the rampant corruption with impunity in the land.

The persistence of poverty, joblessness and inequality is also due to the exploitative cadres taking all the spoils of liberation for themselves. The notion that “I did not join the revolution to be poor” is alive and overfed in South Africa.

At the time of Union, the estimated population of South Africa was 25% of European extraction, today that has shrunk to just over 8%, with a skewed distribution toward the aged. This phenomenon is explained in an eve of liberation conversation between Cyril Ramaphosa and Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, an IFP parliamentarian, that is recorded in the latter’s posthumous memoir:

“In his brutal honesty, Ramaphosa told me of the ANC’s 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight.”

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Commenting on these revelations, which have never been denied by Ramaphosa, the late John Kane-Berman of the South Africa Institute for Race Relations observed in 2017 that:

“Although his language was lurid, what Mr Ramaphosa told Dr Oriani-Ambrosini is in line with the ‘strategy and tactics’ documents the ANC and its South Africa CP allies publish from time to time on the national democratic revolution. Implementation does not involve a ‘big-bang’ approach, because this would frighten the horses, or alert the frogs. An incremental approach is likely to be more successful. Move forward where you can, stage a tactical retreat if you provoke too much opposition, and then press forward when the time is more auspicious.

“To what extent Mr Ramaphosa is still committed to what he said in his speech about white people and frogs is not clear. As a trade unionist before he went into politics, he had to adopt a pragmatic approach. If he ever became president of the ANC and of the country, would pragmatism supplant revolutionary ideology?”

It is clear from the 2022 policy documents mentioned above that the ANC has not really embraced pragmatism and remains determined to follow its NDR course to the destruction of South Africa as a viable modern state — one in which meritocracy and honesty combine with pragmatism to deliver a better life to all via the dutiful implementation of the values enshrined in the Constitution and its justiciable Bill of Rights. The latter obliges the state to respect and protect everyone’s human rights.

Ramaphosa was introduced to the National Assembly as a “true revolutionary” when he was proposed as president in 2018.

The implications of this sad state of affairs are serious. The ANC, using what it calls “dexterity in tact”, governs by sleight of hand, paying lip-service to constitutional values while actually advancing its NDR agenda. The ANC is turning the nation, christened by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as the “Rainbow Nation of God”, into an African nationalist frog-boiling exercise on its way to becoming a failed state.

In order to answer the challenge laid down for them by Russell Pollitt, our religious leaders need to turn to the teachings of Tutu. In a sermon at St Michael’s Church in Observatory, Cape Town in 1986 he preached that:

“The angels and archangels help us in our warfare against the powers of evil, spiritual forces beyond our strength to overcome and we know that the war has already been won even if the battles seem to be so hard fought. We are on the winning side. Injustice, oppression, evil, exploitation have already been routed and we are God’s fellow workers with the angels to establish His Kingdom of righteousness of justice, of love and peace and reconciliation, of laughter and joy, of compassion and caring, of fellowship and sharing in which we know that each individual person is of infinite worth, not just to be respected, but to be held in awe and reverence, to abuse this person makes us guilty of blasphemy.”

Tutu was a master at compassionate confrontation. He stood between a howling mob bent on necklacing an alleged impimpi, he confronted the leadership of the National Party head on and he lived to see the Constitution passed as the supreme law of the land. He chaired the TRC for the sake of love, peace and reconciliation.

Our religious leaders cannot allow that legacy to go to waste in 2022.

Later in life, he admonished the ANC to “watch out!” and wrote a book titled God is not a Christian.

The single most intractable issue facing South Africa today is that corruption with impunity has taken root and become a culture among ANC cadres and their fellow travellers in business.

Faith-based organisations must compassionately confront this phenomenon by putting their weight behind the reform of the criminal justice administration that was gutted in the Zuma years. The leadership of the Anglican Church and the Programme Manager of the Catholic Parliamentary Liaison Office have expressed support for the campaign by Accountability Now for a new Chapter Nine body that specialises in countering serious corruption.

Others could and should follow suit.

The late Kader Asmal was a Cabinet minister who resigned from Parliament rather than vote for the dissolution of the Scorpions anti-corruption unit. He vociferously encouraged the ANC to abandon the NDR. Religious leaders should do likewise. The ideology behind the NDR has never worked anywhere that it has been tried all over the world and it serves no good purpose in 2022.

The fact that the teachings of the godless Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin inform the NDR’s philosophy is reason enough for faith-based organisations to mobilise against it.

The Constitution entrenches multi-party democracy under the rule of law. The Bill of Rights obliges the state to respect and protect human rights guaranteed to all. Hegemony and cadre deployment are incompatible with the Constitution. Compassionate confrontation of the misguided cadres is indicated. Pollitt is right, the leadership of South Africa’s faith-based organisations need to step up and confront, following Tutu’s example. DM