Mandela Day 2022 has come and gone. In November 2009 the United Nations set aside this day to celebrate South Africa’s arguably most famous son, global icon and statesman on 18 July – coinciding with his birthday in 1918.
The core idea behind Mandela Day is the simple yet radical one that everyone has the power to transform the world and to make an impact – in their own right, wherever they are and in whatever they do. This is a clarion call to action, targeting individuals, communities, nations and the global community to find in themselves selfless resolve and resilience to cause change, from the self outward, for the betterment of the human condition.
Mandela’s life came to define this high and noble calling. Here was a man whose force of character, principle and conviction steered a nascent republic in its first steps to a democratic dispensation from the dark past and the attendant cleavages that define modern South Africa notwithstanding.
There is, however, another aspect of Mandela that is often not highlighted and which may afford South Africa a collective pause. For a fact, Mandela was a thoroughbred ANC cadre: from his formative days in the ANC Youth League, to the Rivonia Trial, to the 27 years of incarceration, to his release and his ascendancy to the presidency and post presidency life.
Post his imprisonment, he was deeply instrumental in engineering the “capture” of the South African political and administrative state by his party. This project was largely successful, with the ANC winning by 62,65% vote in the first democratic elections in April 1994, securing 252 seats in a 400-member National Assembly.
This overwhelming mandate given to the ANC, which the party has largely held since then, was and continues to supposedly be an investment of trust by South Africans for society to be transformed. The question that needs to be posed is whether the current ANC has lived up to the lofty mission. Largely, the ANC of recent years has become a strange animal with little semblance to the DNA of Mandela’s ANC, which was defined by selfless service for the upliftment of society.
The contemporary ANC is a factional enterprise populated by people of dubious political morality that has largely become the albatross to South Africa’s collective endeavour.
If the argument that organisations are as good as the people who populate them – and especially those who execute decision-making – is taken as a truism, what has largely hobbled the ANC and deeply compromised the upliftment of South African citizens from years of systemic poverty is the dubious policy of cadre deployment.
This is the capable hand of the ANC that has become mendacious cronyism to reward party factions, family, friends and sometimes lovers and criminal elements that have held the state captive through entrepreneurship.
The cumulative net effect is what has come to be known as state capture-takeover, control and manipulation of state institution processes, services and outcomes by extra-state actors.
Without serving the greater good of society, the ANC’s control of the South African state can only be described as “capture”. South Africans, since days of yore, have been impelled to stand up against oppression and aggression.
) Eddie Rasoeu is a DA proportional representation councillor in the Mangaung Metro.
