Struggle Is Our Life

Mervyn Bennun: After our Kristalinacht, SA’s brave struggle faces defeat.
Business Day, 30 May 2008 PIC: wikinews.org

A Rejoinder -We can and we should defeat defeat!

Yours is an alternative voice in many ways than one. The xenophobia that has displaced so many of our African brothers and sisters in South Africa riles even the humblest amongst us. Your approach to the problem-and its antecedents- is refreshing. Refreshing because it puts back to the table the nobility of the struggle we fought to be free.

Dialogue has lately gone to cast doubt on the cause? In troubled Zimbabwe, the MDC says the people must liberate themselves from their liberators. Thabo Mbeki, the mediator in the Zimbabwean crisis, is seen as being too soft on his Zimbabwean counterpart, Robert Mugabe, because of their struggle history. The MDC can campaign however it wants, but in the end –like in the case of liberation movements that freed other African countries- the struggle that ZANU and ZAPU fought shall remain sullied. It (this struggle) is something we are encouraged to distrust.

The xenophobia attacks in SA have invited nasty remarks. Our leaders have been correctly criticized for waking late in the day when the ‘town was burning.’ Then the leaders were likened to the African leaders of the continent who neglect their own as soon as they ascend to high office. It is said that this is exactly what happens with the so-called strugglers. They engage in gallant fights in the name of the people as a ploy to get into positions of influence so that they can plunder the resources of their countries. Look at Zimbabwe in the hands of liberators, and tell us what stops our country from going the same route when it is in the hands of liberators? The struggle is sullied.

The reflex is to blame one another for errors committed in the here and now, plan for the future and forget the past. This way, the struggle that will be fought will be against our own beliefs, values and the new direction we were intent on charting. We see the folly of our ways in the xenophobic attacks on our fellow Africans, but then we blame our ANC for the degeneration. “Attack, attack, attack!” as former Orlando Pirates FC coach, Victor Bondarenko, used to say. We attack the new country and spit on its leaders, then turn on its history as well as the graves of its fallen martyrs and spit some more. There is no value there. We cannot redeem anything! The struggle loses its meaning. Its songs serve the rage and disdain that we represent in these new times, and like some blogger we are wont to say we ‘cancel the belief that struggle is noble.’

This struggle about which Patrice Lumumba had said, “…no Congolese (substitute for South African) worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that independence has only been won by struggle, a struggle that went on day after day, a struggle of fire and idealism, a struggle in which we spared neither effort, deprivation, suffering or even our blood.

The struggle involving tears, fire and blood is something of which we are proud in our deepest hearts, for it was a noble and just struggle, which was needed to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force.”

Indeed nobody can fault you for feeling the way you do. But everybody should praise you for giving us ‘umkhombandlela’ (direction) in the new South Africa we are building.-

Nkosana Zali, Mogale City GP

Tony Leon possibly hates African people

When Tony Leon addressed a policy conference recently, his diatribe was as loaded as his political irrelevance.

He says that he had perceived Thabo Mbeki to be an efficient backroom manipulator, but was proven wrong (and possibly disappointed even though he had said that a Mbeki bid for presidency of the ANC would be bad news for democracy) by the ANC Polokwane conference-where Mbeki (of 'narrow Africanism') was pipped for presidency by his former deputy president in the SA government, Jacob Zuma. Can a politician's manipulation of events or anything be a virtue?


Then there is the African kleptocracy that Jacob Zuma will foster when he assumes office, couple that with unwanted redistribution in the economy (because Zuma, the 'demagogue', will be pleasing his union and communist friends)? Knowing that John Vorster and PW Botha, under whom his father served as a judge and Tony as a soldier, were born in Africa, does this kleptocracy refer to them as well as previous heads of state? How about Nelson Mandela?

He does not want Zuma to travel the world and reassure investors about South Africa's economic policies going forward. The reason is that 'the demagogue' holds no view on such things. Leon warns the world to be aware (and very afraid) because this uncivilised and needing-restraint Zuma will (like all Africans who are on a wild binge for acquisition of power and property) steal, loot and ...name the vice!


South African workers have for years been championing an onslaught against economic policies of the government and had found no less equal an opponent to them as central government and the DA that was led by Tony Leon. Speed up the GEAR macroeconomic policy and its austerities, he demanded. He charged that the country had a bloated civil service that needed to be trimmed down. How? Privatize state assets! Reduce the head count! For the private sector: the 'harder it is to fire, the less inclined employers will be to hire,' he would exclaim. He was in charge, the leader of the opposition. In the run-up to the 2001 local government elections in South Africa, he had announced that the ANC government could not ignore an opposition that has a defined and important constituency, whether it is a 'political or racial one.' He still saw the country in terms of races. But say affirmative action then he charges reverse racism?

Now the jobs are gone and he is no longer the DA head. Like a Wizard he has found his soul? "Why did we lose jobs in the economy?" he asked, though not in such exact words but in his usual roundabout way. I had penned a letter to the editor of a newspaper wherein I expressed my reservations about Leon's concern for the poor. Maybe I did not understand then that he admired manipulators. It is a twisted thing when a racist pronounces pity for the poor when the expression rests on a desire to aggravate their circumstances. A writer, and liberal for that matter, Pierre Manent said," Pity is selfish...Moreover, pity does not necessarily bring with it the idea of action designed to put an end to the pathetic situation that aroused it in the first place...Pity's chief limitation can be summed up briefly; it does nothing to get us out of the state of nature." In a nutshell, poor people do not ask to be pitied and they detest hypocrisy. Work with them to change their lot in action, not words!!

He tries to atone for himself by praising Zuma for his stance on crime. Yeah!? We are backward and need to be jailed, the xenophobia attacks probably prove his case? He praises Zuma for his stance on Aids. Yeah!? Remember how the slave masters called us an oversexed and promiscuous lot? People are dying of HIV/Aids...and the better the management of the disease then the better it will be for the SADC region. It is altruistic and human to want that but Leon just does not give a damn!

South Africa is going for elections in 2009, and all kinds of things are likely to be said. I bet Leon would not want to be left out of the limelight? How he pines for the 'screen of power.' But, what does it say about his successor?

South Africa can still wait a year for Mbeki to retire!

Mr President: time to go?

Your first page Comment, Sunday Times of the 25th May 2008, got me thinking. I choose to link it to your story on demands for exorcism in Germany? In a way, the Comment suggests that the country is in a grip of evil from which it could only be freed by a dignified retreat or forced removal of the State President from office. Could ‘release’ be the word that sanitizes it?

The xenophobic attacks on fellow Africans cannot and should not be condoned by all right thinking and peace-loving South Africans. The condemnation should be reinforced by stiff punishments against perpetrators that our courts can mete out for offences committed against our brothers and sisters, and against the standing of our country in the world of nations.

However, your Comment tended to conflate issues and I lost its nub somehow. Let me, from the outset, state that an Mbeki apologist, I am not. Neither am I a Zuma fan. What would my wife think if she were to find out that I took vows to be hers forever then all of a sudden I belong to another man? If the two men have camps, then everybody else is on a political excursion. Like all excursions, those who were born and lived the longest at a destination know it better than their visitors. Excursions deliver charming or nasty surprises and when the trip is over some feel like throwing up when they think of their experience whilst others ‘are just dying to go back.’ But who was born and lived the longest in the new South Africa? Who is this fourteen year old new South African who has the expertise to guide us through our many challenges? This is not a parable.

Academics and commentators have suggested in many newspaper articles and on one book about Mbeki that an objective study on his presidency can only be done after he has left office. It is now suggested that he should Blair! Maybe that will hasten a study, which is what interests me, though I wonder which president he will be compared with? Mandela, who served a term? Will it be apartheid leaders? Or will we just look at leaders who led nations in transition? Then the next leader of South Africa, if they serve two terms, will be studied against his or her predecessor, Mbeki.

This call for the State President to step down comes from some leaders of the ANC and its alliance partners. Lately a business leader has joined this call because of a ‘vacuum created by two centres of power’. (When this was posted, the demand had been dropped by Cosatu) The Sunday Times makes its call for Mbeki's resignation for different reasons. But are they different? The suggestion to have a senior leader of the ANC (presumably its Deputy President) take up the reins until the next election is telling!

The Sunday Times could be tabling an innocent proposal, due largely to influences of its independent watchdog role, the vaunted objectivity and its progressiveness. Politics is a different terrain, the editors know that though, and its science teaches us that concepts and notions are not always innocent. Often when ordinary folks like us, and the editors of Sunday Times, make such comments as ‘the president must go’, we propel to heights unimagined what his adversaries have set in motion. One does not need to state verbatim what adversaries to another have said, or blame mere coincidence when you end up holding the gun in another’s war. It is dangerous when that appeal is an emotional one, contingent, for instance, on a subjective understanding of what is South Africa’s lack of ‘international influence’? Adversaries to Mbeki will benefit from something that uncritical, that does not compel and is very much un-Sunday Times? For the paper, the Comment was business unusual! I work on the supposition that the Sunday Times is no Mbeki adversary? It could be … nothing wrong with that. But at least be bold and declare that to remove anything that could be considered surreptitious in the Comment. Or is it starting to put its colours to the mast? Is this something that could verily be the Sunday Time’s own transition?

I doubt that members of the ANC will be persuaded by the tack your paper took on this matter. Even attempts at an extreme exposition; ‘lying’, ‘incompetent’ or ‘women giving birth amid the horror’, the Comment –genuinely founded on xenophobia and its effects on the country- held up a false problem that wants to suggest that the ANC is a blind movement that will let an individual, Mbeki, squander years of its painstaking reconstruction of this country. Essentially, that is what the charge is. It is an unconscious one, nonetheless. It says that the ANC has failed the country for the nine years of Mbeki’s rule, so a call for his removal (without objective assessment of his nine years) is a call for the removal of the ANC as a ruling party – despite an assuaging proposition that its parliamentarians (assumed bored until given an assignment by the media) should vote him out and let the Speaker or Chief Justice do this or that to arrest the morass (i.e. exorcise us). In its diligence, the Sunday Times provides guidance because where there are no leaders there are no cadres?

This other thing, that this transition to new leadership should be pegged prominently in the manner you (or even the ANC leaders who speak on the matter in their personal capacity) have, goes to cast aspersions on the ability of the ANC to transition. Rudiments show that even ANC branches have been transitioning on an annual basis, now they will do so biannually. Contests for leadership become robust and when change of guard should occur, it happens smoothly. Nobody runs away with a branch because they lost. To argue otherwise reduces a branch to a thing, its members to something lifeless and without faculties. Extrapolation therefore says that we reduce the country to a thing, its people to something lifeless and without faculties (especially the capacity to think). The paper does point to an outcry that made Mbeki decide on bringing in the army to stem internecine xenophobic attacks on our African family. We are not dead. How can we let one of 46 million of us loot our aspirations and brains? He must be very powerful! Mbeki might run it, but will not run away with the country because Polokwane outcomes did not favour him. It is a paranoid reaction to seek change in the number one office now. I am sure the point needs to be made. The president of the ANC can sing and dance, but I wonder if he would like your tune? Well, Mbeki will be gone in less than a year. So, do we need this? Got me thinking.