When Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell back in 1996 there was almost immediate outrage, with an attendant wave of moral and ethical panic. Now, in 2023, while the ethics of cloning continues to be a debate largely within the scientific community, the widespread public outcry has faded. A lesson here is that the more we become used to something, and the deeper it slips into everyday life, the less disturbing we find it, and the less moral panic it provokes.

Between the Sarafina scandal of 1996 and the Digital Vibes case of 2021, South Africa had a generational slide into a pit of corruption, maladministration, criminality and violence that has pushed society to unprecedented levels of exasperation, exhaustion and despondency. In the two years or so since the Digital Vibes saga was first uncovered, exposés of more egregious graft and criminality have left the public feeling abandoned and abused, pushing many to consider whether everything that has been achieved since 1994 has been ethically justified, and whether we have reached the moral limits of our membership and loyalty to South Africa — and of our tolerance of the ANC. The ruling elite, politicians, cadres in employment, cadres in “structures” and those businesspeople with firm connections to the ANC seem to have abandoned the “do no harm principle”. This is the idea that members of state and society are free to do as they please, as long as nobody is harmed. That, it seems, has become too high an expectation.

If it is true that there are crime cartels operating within Eskom, and that key person/s within Eskom receive  “a substantial amount in cash, including extra funds to bribe the other employees in the [electricity] supply chain to ensure their cooperation”, the notion that “the rot has set in” leaps from being a metaphor to describing a real state of affairs. Alongside that reality, is the reality of “loadshedding”. I use quotation marks because it is, actually, too polite a term for “the destruction of electricity supply” which has led to forms of abuse, damage to personal property and the disruption of lives. How long will it be before criminals exploit the dark and run amok across communities? These forms of violence and abuse, mental damage, anguish, anxiety and fear could have lasting effects on society. The ANC has lost all credibility and moral standing, and cannot be counted on to reverse this degringolade and its consequences.

It’s difficult to imagine that President Cyril Ramaphosa and the trustworthy among his colleagues — a really small circle — are not aware of the long-term effects of this assault on South African society. Ramaphosa and these colleagues are helpless, though. Forget for the moment that any one of them may have sticky fingers. Imagine that they want to clean up the ANC and rid the country of corruption. This is a near-impossible task. As a social movement, the ANC is formidable, and occupies much of its own world; it is the centre of its own attention. Since the expulsion of Julius Malema and the rise of the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction, those South Africans who run outside the ANC, have become painfully aware of the fractures within the old liberation movement.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

None of this is new, though. The ANC has always been wracked with internal power struggles. The births of the Pan Africanist Congress (in 1958/59), Congress of the People (2008), and the Economic Freedom Fighters (2013) were almost directly the result of differences with the ANC. The RET faction, and other politically meaningless formations like the African Transformation Movement, are only the most recent splinters from the ANC.

What has become clearer since revelations of State Capture, the Zondo Commission and more recently the increased electricity blackouts accompanied by suggestions of corruption and sabotage at Eskom, is that the ANC has made a new enemy in the public and among many of the people who have consistently voted for the moment since 1994. There are, no doubt, political loyalists — the die-hards, those who sincerely believe that the movement has good intentions and remains the best hope for the country — as well as those who are desperately trying to retain the status quo to secure their “feeding” or “eating”; those revolutionaries whose performative politics is a terribly weak disguise for their ambitions. They simply want access to the feeding troughs.

Read on Daily Maverick: South Africa may be on the verge of ‘going to the dogs’ but disaster can still be narrowly averted

For more and more people, especially those in urban areas, the ANC has lost the moral authority which has served as a political resource and source of power, and has pushed South Africans to their collective moral limit. The ANC has become like the obstreperous friend whom you no longer invite to parties. There was a time, we have to assume, when a half-decent member of society who saw the ANC on a city pavement would try to speak to it, and try to find out what, exactly, has gone wrong. Today, when you see the ANC walking towards you, you simply cross the street and give the movement a wide berth. There really is nothing that the ANC can do to keep the faith of anyone but the die-hards who do not accept that reality has placed serious moral limits on our ability to embrace the movement that was once led by Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada.

The ANC has abused its privilege of governance, and can no longer even be tolerated. This intolerance, in a perverse twist of “the paradox of tolerance”, is now permissible. It is reaching a stage where intellectually honest citizens, people with great integrity, cannot in good conscience conjure moral acceptance of the ANC. It becomes permissible to ask: Should we even listen to the ANC? Should we even ask, or listen to the opinions of ANC leaders? In “objective” terms, would you give a poor, unemployed woman, who can barely feed her family, the same airtime as you would anyone in the ANC? Do they even belong on the same platform?

Those who remember the Sarafina debacle will recall the shock of the exposé, the outrage felt by many.  But we have seen so many repeats. Now, the near complete collapse of South Africa’s electricity supply, corruption and sabotage in public enterprises, the country’s greylisting, and the soaring rates of crime and violence and banditry on the highways, don’t provoke the same response, and are not regarded as shocking exceptions.

One may be tempted to speak of complete collapse but South Africa is not a failed state — not yet, anyway. It is becoming clearer, however, that the ANC does not have the answers nor the moral authority to lead South Africa out of the dark, and up from the depths it has plumbed. It is a scary thought that the country has not reached the bottom (yet). And unfortunately, to borrow and redeploy revolutionary-speak, we cannot expect the people who brought the country to its knees to lift it up. DM