THE SORRY STATE OF SOUTH AFRICA'S OPPOSITION PARTIES: PART ONE.

"Resistance among the powerful is natural when change clashes with their self-interest." Essay, So my floor became my sisters' ceiling, Warren Buffet, chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway, 02 May 2013.

In one of his more delicious waggish remarks of unforgettable levity, the great American author, Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, wrote:

"Imagine you are an idiot. And imagine you are a member of Congress. But I am repeating myself."

Is it too impolite in today's South Africa to ask someone to imagine that he is an idiot, and to also imagine that he is a member of any of South Africa's opposition parties, only for him to discover it is all tautology?

But listening to the brimstone and acid rain overflowing verbiage of post-1994 opposition parties in South Africa hollering against the ruling African National Congress (ANC)'s administrations in the last twenty years, you will not at all be reminded of Mark Twain.

Forget it.

The daily doomsday political sermons and pontification of the opposition parties in our democracy would instead harry you forth to the Good News Bible's Old Testament, the Book of Micah 7:2-5. In this chapter, this is how Israel's Moral Corruption is condemned:

"There is not an honest person left in the land, no one loyal to God. Everyone is waiting for a chance to commit murder. Everyone hunts down his own people. They are all experts in doing evil. Officials and judges ask for bribes. The influential person tells them what he wants, and so they scheme together. Even the best and honest of them are as worthless as weeds."

We can broadly agree that, on the whole, it is in these damning biblical-scale terms of the Book of Micah that our opposition parties, especially Helen Zille's Democratic Alliance (DA) and its predecessor, the Democratic Party (DP), have mischaracterized, and continue to mischaracterize, in the main, what they depict, often incorrectly, as the ANC government's Moral Corruption since the advent of our democracy in 1994. In the post-apartheid South Africa, which has been governed by the ANC without interruption, and whose 20th anniversary we are celebrating this year, the opposition parties seem to be convinced that "even the best and most honest of them (ANC leaders, members, supporters and voters) are as worthless as weeds."

This is harsh. This cannot be the whole truth, quite obviously.

According to our opposition parties, South Africa has effectively become a dystopia under the ANC government. It is a searing, unforgiving, a-tongue-for-a-tongue Old Testament-style and Dante-sque political verdict on the ANC government's performance in the last twenty years of our democracy by our combined political opposition.

But are our opposition parties accurate in their overall assessment of the performance of the ANC government in the last two decades? And, as the Bible asks, who, after all, are they, including the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), to play God and to stand in ceremony and pass judgment over the ANC government's performance?

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