A senior journalist from one of our reputable newspapers recently asked me: "How did the ANC lose its moral compass so soon?" "That is precisely the mistake we make", I responded. "The ANC never had a moral compass; apartheid was the enemy and our fight against it did not necessarily make us morally righteous."
Like the nationalist party before it, the ANC victory was about the seizure of power, about control and ownership of the economy, and about racial domination. How else do we make sense of the Auditor-General and Public Protector's regular reports of billions of rands worth of corruption going into the personal pockets of deployed cadres?
Looting of the state's coffers for personal enrichment; stealing the country's mineral wealth for black economic empowerment; and using the procurement process for the primitive accumulation of wealth, have become a national pastime.
The conflation of state and party is ingrained in the ANC's DNA. Commanding eternal loyalty for liberating us from Apartheid is precisely the entitlement that brutally destroyed Ghaddafi a few days ago.
Already in 1990, Paul Trewhela wrote:
"The next hot spot for the ANC was in Zambia, where the headquarters of the ANC was based and where most of the leadership was living. This was in 1980. MK cadres, who had been drilled for months in ‘communist ideology' of the Soviet-East European type to denounce all luxuries and accept the hazards of the struggle, here came into direct confrontation with the opposite way of life lived by the ANC leaders. It became clear that the financial support extended to the ANC was used to finance the lavish way of life of the ANC leadership. Corruption, involving rackets of car, diamond and drug smuggling, was on a high rise."