We dare not downplay the implications for South Africa of any decisions made at the African National Congress’s (ANC) 55th national elective conference.
South Africa is already in serious trouble that can only be fixed by the political middle – that is, by political and civil society organisations that are committed to reason when it comes to examining our nation and the issues that affect us, rather than to populist, non-scientific, and frequently really stupid ideas and principles held by the likes of the ANC and the EFF, and some others, too.
Beyond party politics, the young political middle, united in our centrism, must organise a youth front to find practical and reasonable solutions to the socio-economic and political problems that youth and society as a whole share.
This is a crucial call to action in view of the ANC’s tyrannical and morally reprehensible stranglehold over all facets of our national governmental structures, and the very real prospect of a poisonous ANC-EFF coalition government by 2024.
To promote reasonable policy positions and remedies against a tyrannical regime, moderates outside the ANC administration must collaborate and exert greater pressure for change. For them to succeed, they must be prepared to set aside their rivalries.
Intolerable
We, the younger generation, will be the ones to inherit this country in the future, and it is thus intolerable for us to accept that it will be in an even worse state than it is right now.
Academics, civil society organisations, religious institutions, and other moderate groupings must all band together to oppose the ANC, the EFF, or any other party of chancers that seeks to undermine the very things that bind us together as a people in a natural, interconnected, and beautiful way, such as a free market economy, our desire to be free of government interference in our personal affairs, and non-racialism.
The ANC’s interference with basic principles like non-racism and the free market economy is what has caused the high unemployment rate we currently have. This is among the problems that opposition parties of the moderate middle will undoubtedly be able to solve if they work well together. But if they fail to cooperate, they will simply hand the country over to an even more corrupt ANC government in 2024, just over a year from now, or a deadly EFF-ANC coalition.
After the 2024 national elections, whether or not our country follows Zimbabwe’s path may depend on the political middle’s capacity to unite and cooperate.
This unity is essential not only to ending the tyranny that is the ANC, but, more than that, to ensuring that ours indeed becomes the successful country that is the South African majority’s collective dream.
It was Mandela, after all, who advised us: ‘If the ANC does to you what the Apartheid government did to you, then you must do to the ANC what you did to the Apartheid government.’
Dealt with
The ANC administration needs to be dealt with in the same way that apartheid was dealt with by Mandela’s generation of ANC members.
We must either take action to protect our natural variety, constitutional democracy, and interdependence as a people and especially the young people, or we must be content to live with the consequences of doing nothing.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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