The greatest misconception in South African politics is that the economic decline, corruption, collapse of institutions and racial animosity since 1994 have been caused by a few naughty individuals within the African National Congress (ANC) rather than by the ANC itself. The false theory says that a few ne’er-do-wells, such as Jacob Zuma, defiled the ANC’s noble aims. Nonsense.
The ANC’s only aim since 1976 was to seize power, hold it, and enrich itself. Jacob Zuma was a variation on the theme, not a departure from it. Mainstream ANC leaders, innocent of Zondo Commission crimes, are every bit as important in the ANC’s misgovernance. A prime example is Dr Naledi Pandor. A recent radio interview confirmed this to a shocking degree.
Dr Pandor was an ANC MP from 1994, and has held high government office since 1999. From 2004 to 2009, she was Minister of Education. The ANC’s horrible betrayal of poor black children is the worst of its sins. Pandor presided over that betrayal. State schools, which became increasingly controlled by SADTU, perhaps the ANC’s most important political ally, disintegrated to the extent that South African children now have the world’s lowest results for literacy and numeracy. The ANC elite, including Pandor herself, made quite sure that their own children never went near any of the state schools they had wrecked. They sent their own children to private schools or posh Model-C schools where most of the teachers were white. No affirmative action teachers for them.
Pandor’s PhD thesis was on ‘The contested meaning of transformation in higher education in post-apartheid South Africa’. I wonder if it contained a sentence like this, ‘How I achieved transformation in education by condemning poor working-class black children to rotten state schools, where little black children sometimes drowned in pit latrines, while I sent my own son to Bishops and my own daughter to Herschel.’ Or, ‘Why working-class black children must have black teachers but upper-class black children must have white teachers.’
‘Loath to make quick judgements’
Pandor is now Minister of International Relations and Cooperation. I heard her being interviewed on SAFM radio this week. The interviewer asked for the Government’s views on the Ugandan General Election held on 14 January 2021. President Museveni, who has ruled Uganda for 35 years since he seized power in 1986, was standing again for the presidency. Against him was Robert Kyagulanyi (known as Bobi Wine). Museveni’s security forces clamped down on opposition members and journalists, and arrested scores of people, including Bobi Wine. In November 2020 they killed 54 protesters asking for Wine’s release. The election results, showing Museveni had won for the sixth time, seemed blatantly fraudulent. Pandor refused to criticise them in any way, saying, ‘we have been loath to make quick judgements’. This was two months after Museveni had killed and imprisoned opposition politicians.
In other words, Pandor takes the same stance on African diplomacy as everybody else in the ANC, including Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Dr Dlamini-Zuma. Any blood-soaked African tyrant who persecutes and oppresses African people can be assured of her support. The ANC has no criticism of Robert Mugabe’s institutionalised racial slaughter of over 20 000 Ndebele people in 1983; Dlamini-Zuma made that clear.
Thabo Mbeki fully supported Mugabe’s reign of terror after he lost the 2008 election by a landslide. Now Pandor supports Museveni’s trampling of democracy in Uganda. She is part of an official, collective ANC view that we must always support African tyranny. African people count for nothing. (There are recent reports that Cyril Ramaphosa might be hesitating in indicating approval of the Ugandan election. Good news, if true.)
Asked about corruption in Africa, Pandor said that the real problem was grasping imperialists who wanted to plunder Africa’s natural resources. In other words, big mining companies such as BHP and Glencore must get out of Africa. She must be pleased they are doing so. This again is the standard ANC view (which, however, never stops the ANC begging international companies to invest here).
African hero
Uganda is an interesting case. In 1971, Idi Amin, a soldier, seized power there in a coup. He proceeded to slaughter about 300 000 political and tribal opponents. In 1972 he ordered all the Asians in Uganda to be expelled. These actions made him a great African hero, prepared to defy the imperialists.
Amin declared, ‘Our deliberate policy is to transfer the economic control of Uganda into the hands of Ugandans, for the first time in our country’s history.’ He sounded just like Naledi Pandor and Robert Mugabe. In 1976 Amin, in recognition for his valiant work for African liberation, was made Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity. It later became the African Union (AU). Dlamini-Zuma became chairperson of the AU in 2012, and no doubt felt proud to be a successor of Idi Amin.
The Zondo Commission is important and good. But it is not designed to explain the fundamental reason for the disaster of ANC government – which is the ANC itself.
[Picture: Alex Radelich on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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