On Friday morning, one of this publication’s very own, Barney Mthombothi, posed a question on Twitter that goes to the heart of the shenanigans that took place at the Saint George Hotel in Irene on Thursday night: “Why were ministers meeting a private army in a hotel?”
I really felt that.
Why was the Liberation Struggle War Veterans (LSWV) group even granted a meeting with two cabinet ministers and a deputy minister, less than 24 hours after the group was implicated in a security breach at Luthuli House?
The ANC’s Johannesburg headquarters had to be evacuated following the breach, which had been preceded by a march in which the group’s members demanded R2.2m each as compensation for their role in the liberation struggle. This was followed by a sit-in and a sleep-in by the group allegedly comprising members of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Military Veterans Association, as well as former members of the Pan Africanist Congress’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army and Azapo’s Azanian National Liberation Army.
The government’s response to this violation of security measures? Grant the 20 people affiliated with the group a private audience at a hotel in Centurion. This was intended to be with the country’s deputy president, but later changed to a meeting with the minister in the presidency and the minister of defence & military veterans and her deputy.
There can be no other conclusion but that this exceptional treatment for a lawless group of individuals is a consequence of their affiliation with the ANC — and specifically with the so-called RET (radical economic transformation) faction of the party, whose lodestar happens to be one Jacob Zuma. With an ANC elective party conference looming in 2022, and Zuma’s perennial threats to foment internal dissent against him, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his government will remain gratuitously distracted by party intrigues for the next 14 months.
This at a time when the country needs the president to lead a robust economic recovery from Covid-19, get our security and intelligence apparatus in order, manage a national vaccine rollout amid heavy pushback from anti-vaxxers and lunatic-fringe conspiracy theorists, and protect and restore the rule of law throughout our ailing criminal justice system.
By his own admission, minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele indicated that members of the LSWV are neither registered with the department of military veterans nor an officially recognised organisation under the umbrella of the South African National Military Veterans Association.
In other words, they are an unrecognised, unvetted group of individuals whose members may or may not actually be military veterans — yet government resources at the highest level were urgently deployed to answer their grievances within hours of being raised.
If only South Africans who do not claim membership of the ANC and its affiliates were able to enjoy such responsive government at the drop of a hat — unemployed young people, for example. Or victims of gender-based violence, impoverished rural communities, and residents of one of SA’s 175 dysfunctional and distressed municipalities — a significant majority, representing 68% of the country’s local authorities.
Instead of urgent ministerial meetings and press conferences announcing further additions to the already bountiful annual budget of R654m that the department commands for supporting military veterans, South Africans residing in these rotten municipalities must make do with injunctions from Deputy President David Mabuza to disregard delivery failures and simply vote for the ANC on November 1 because “it is your organisation that delivered you from Egypt to the promised land”.
If only South Africans who do not claim membership of the ANC and its affiliates were able to enjoy such responsive government at the drop of a hat — unemployed young people, for example
This prioritisation by the state of ANC intrigues over matters affecting citizens across the political spectrum who they are supposed to serve is yet another manifestation of the dangerous fusion of party and state. In the eyes of many — particularly those in the party — the state is the ANC and the ANC is the state.
And as a result, SA continues to be identified both locally and internationally with the dysfunction and deterioration of that organisation. We are still dealing with the fallout from an insurrection — yes, insurrection — in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng whose sole cause was internal ructions within the ANC.
And now this week’s local and international headlines paint a picture of our country as a clichéd, predictable, inevitable banana republic in which cabinet ministers are routinely “kidnapped” and “held hostage” by rogue military actors. This when the reality is that the ministers attending the meeting were there to attend to party interests with their own members, and the ersatz “military” group with which they had a stand-off has no standing either in the South African military or the department of military veterans.
The truth is that we are the real hostages — not a group of cabinet ministers, meeting irregularly with their own reckless party affiliates. It is we who remain endlessly in thrall to the ANC’s vicissitudes, and our country which seems always to be associated with the party’s inevitable decline.
And unless we can effect our own escape, the party’s fate will indeed become our own.
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