Every year the Auditor General's report on the mismanagement of municipalities is as predictable as Cape Town's rain in winter. It hangs like a Damocles Sword over the ANC, yet the Party has no idea how to solve the crisis.
No longer a surprise, we have come to expect these qualified audits and the reasons are clear - the lack of skills, managerial and financial incompetence, corruption, and cadre deployment, and more. These problems are but symptoms of a much deeper malaise.
The tumour is embedded in the heart of the ANC and needs radical excision. Public sector reform requires a more surgical procedure than just appointing competent people and putting new systems in place.
It needs a new language. But more than a decade into our new democracy, the ANC still clings to its Stalinist discourse of the national democratic revolution (NDR), while the president, the cabinet and deployed cadres sport the trappings of the high life, luxury imported cars, mansions and designer clothes.
Clem Sunter makes the point more wryly:
"What is it about you guys that makes you cloak everything in dead white Russian speak? I managed to wade through ‘The Second Transition' on the internet and the language used reminded me of stuff Lenin or Stalin would have used." ...Get real. This is 2012 not 1917 and we are in Africa, not the Soviet Union. Even the Russians have moved on now that they realise that most of their socialist yada yada was used to cover up their leaders putting fingers into the cookie jar."