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SA still has a knack for engaging or enraging slogans

Business Day April 29 2004

I was agonising over what to write for today’s column while watching Freedom Day celebrations on television, when a poster leapt out from among the masses: The ANC will rule until Jesus Come.

Amused, I wondered how long the fruits of Liberation before Education will be with us. On this slogan, the movement was divided. Some argued liberation first, others insisted education is liberation. Some followed their hearts, the results of which are clear!

We are now free, and the need for the African National Congress (ANC) to educate the masses is more urgent than ever. No doubt, with education, our language too will be liberated. Politicians should never underestimate the indelible prints their slogans leave on the masses.

So, grammatical or not, our slogans either enrage or engage.

Even through the pain of struggle, South Africans never lost their penchant for witty and humorous slogans, no matter how bad the grammar.

I am reminded of the launch of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983. The meeting was delayed by serious overcrowding. Some people were even hanging from rafters. After many appeals from security guards for people to descend from the rafters, a typical Cape Flats voice shouted impatiently: ‘Manne, manne, klim nou van die beams af, ons wil beginne history maak.’

And so we made history, marching and protesting against the laws that determined where we lived, where we worked, whom we married, where we swam, where we ate and even where we worshipped.

From the masses emerged Dr Allan Boesak, leader of the UDF, hero-worshipped for his bravery, oratory, and charisma, until he fell. Accused of having an affair while hosting Ted Kennedy, the UDF called on him to rebut the allegations, convinced the security police were framing him. A mass meeting was called to a hall in Mitchells Plain where Boesak would repudiate the allegations.

Needless to say, the hall was chock-a-block, filled with comrades and voyeurs alike. Unable to find a seat, I remained outside with the proletariat. As was customary, Boesak, draped in a red cloak, made his dramatic entry, at which point the crowd broke into a spontaneous chant: ‘Boesak, Boesak, Boesak’. The vagrant next to me, all fired up, joined the chorus: ‘Dit is van laat jou Broeksak, Broeksak, Broeksak!’ My day was made because for once I did not doubt the allegations.

In the 1980s when the reproductive and gay rights debate was raging in the liberation movement, a graffito appeared on the walls of Observatory, a leftie Cape Town suburb: ‘Lesbians unite in armed snuggle!’ next to ‘Comrade unite in armed struggle’.

Even in our saddest moments, humour kept us going. As when Albie Sachs lost his arm in a bomb blast in Maputo, the grief that engulfed us was lifted by a macabre but funny slogan on the walls of Cape Town: ‘Albie Sachs, the ANC’s one-armed bandit’. It was made so much more palatable by Albie’s amused acceptance of it.

When the ANC called on the masses to make SA ungovernable, the graffiti on the walls of Orange Street reminded us every day that ‘A naartjie in our sosatie’ (anarchy in our society), while inconvenient, might be one of a number of strategies to bring freedom.

Soon after, when Robert Mugabe condemned homosexuals as lower than beasts, the gay lobby came out in full force, protesting against his visit to the World Trade Centre in Johannesburg.

One slogan proclaimed: ‘Mugabe go home, Zimbabwe needs a queen’; another pointedly read, ‘To MuGaybe or not to MuGaybe’. Funnier than that is rare.

Fortunately, the gift for sloganeering has not left us post-1994, as was evident at the recent doctors’ march to Parliament. ‘I am Manto-negative’, signalled how many doctors felt about the health minister’s inability to govern the health sector and her equivocation on providing antiretrovirals to the masses.

I shall never forget just before 1994, a huge mass rally was held at the University of Western Cape. The entire mass of students sang a most moving rendition of Nkosi Sikelele. From the back of the main hall, a voice croaked: ‘Manne, julle kan darem sing, al het julle nie eers stemreg nie’, and the audience broke into laughter.

We now have stemreg – the right to vote – and the world is at our feet. Hopefully the crowd’s cheering for Mugabe as he ascended the stairs of the Union Buildings to join the celebrations is not symbolic of what it means to have an overwhelming stemreg. A regrettable blot on the festivities in Pretoria.

Hero to zero for media darling Patricia de Lille

Business Day 23 March 2006

Patricia De Lille, the feisty politician, is in the doghouse.

The darling of the media before March 1 2006, she is now the pariah of politics, having earned the titles Patricia de Liar in the Citizen and Mampara in the Sunday Times.

That is because she lied blatantly, saying she would not back the African National Congress (ANC) or its mayoral candidate for Cape Town, Nomaindia Mfeketo, and then doing so at the 11th hour. She continues to deny this, contrary to all media evidence.

De Lille’s fatal flaw is that she believed the image the media created of her. Desperate to have a black opposition leader, the media promoted her, throughout the election, as the honourable black opposition leader this country needs and overlooked her enormous political ineptitude.

The significance of this nail-biting contest for mayor in the City of Cape Town is that it exposed the leader of the Independent Democrats (ID) for what she is – egotistical, immoderate and politically irresponsible.

As the former chief whip of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), De Lille’s trademark was sound bites. Excellent at hurling political bombshells, her street-fighting ability masked the unsophisticated politician she really was. Her lack of political restraint from the time she served as a loyal member of the PAC to her current status as leader of the ID has exposed the irascible political conduct that led to her decline.

For years the PAC protected De Lille. It was entirely predictable that the day she started her own party, she would be unmasked. Those who feel betrayed today, and who voted for her in good faith, failed to see that her actions during the negotiations with opposition parties were consistent with her long political trajectory.

Already during Codesa, De Lille showed her true colours with words that have come to haunt her: ‘No, we (the PAC) are not in favour of power sharing and if we get some kind of majority in the constituent assembly, we will say to hell with whatever they agreed in the negotiations.’

In her relation to the Democratic Alliance (DA), she was and still is completely untrustworthy. She often used them for protection against the ANC, and would abuse them when things were not in her favour. In the Financial Mail, she implied – like Ebrahim Rasool – that, by voting for the DA, coloured people in the Western Cape had lost their racial identity and had voted for ‘the oppressor’.

‘The bottom line here is not an ideology but race. I can’t explain why, to use the liberation phrase, “the oppressed should vote for the oppressor”. Inside myself I’ve said it, “I know I am an African”, but many of our coloured people still need to come to terms with this.’

De Lille is incapable of seizing the moment. Relishing her role as ‘kingmaker’ during the mayoral contest, she pranced around like a queen smelling power for the first time. She tried to outfox the smaller parties by overplaying her hand and lost in a battle where one of her own betrayed her.

Overestimating her own political prowess, she became a liability to her ally, the ANC, to whom she promised much. But why would De Lille sacrifice so much if there was not a quid pro quo – especially given rumours she was offered a deputy minister’s post? Why the sudden love affair with a party she has sought to embarrass at every opportunity? Is she not like all ‘crosstitutes’ who are in politics for personal gain? ‘An honest politician is one, who, when bought, will stay bought,’ to quote US politician Simon Cameron.

If De Lille wishes to survive she should jettison the cult of personality around which the ID has built itself and do some hard political work to earn her credentials. The arms-deal bombshell was marred by her failure to follow through properly. She did not study the joint committee’s report on the arms deal, nor did she participate with Raenette Taljaard and Gavin Woods in the subsequent standing committee on public accounts meetings to expose the major gaps in the report.

One cannot ignore Parliament and spend a great deal of time on the golf course and expect one’s political credibility to stay intact. After all, it is Parliament that pays her salary. In an interview in 2002, De Lille stated openly: ‘I am only going to spend 10% of my time in Parliament, which means I’ll be a de facto absent member. I’ve decided I’ve got better things to do.’

What may seem like courage and principle – a phrase she used ad nauseam throughout the discussions – is stubbornness and a failure to compromise when it is the right thing to do. Using this refrain in the negotiations, as though it was a mark of integrity, provoked a rebellion among her gatvol supporters, one of whom remarked: ‘Kyk hoe lyk haar principles nou!’

Tutu’s clerical peers fail to speak in his defence

Business Day March 31 2005

During the early 1990s, a woman student was raped in a residence of the University of the Western Cape by someone from outside the university. Students were enraged and vowed revenge. In heated vigilante action, they yanked a suspect off the streets, dragged him into the hostels and beat the daylights out of him. No one could control them and Archbishop Desmond Tutu was called in to deal with the mob. Realising that no priestly admonition would help, he waded into this storm of attackers and literally took the victim’s head under his arm, trying to ward off his assailants, who were intent on killing him. Tutu himself was boxed left, right and centre, but persevered until he wrenched the man from the mob.

This fearless priest has saved many from being necklaced and lynched by angry mobs. His courage knew no limits as he took on the National Party government, pointing out how its Christian national ideology was at odds with Christianity. Filled with righteous anger, he would alert the world to what was going on in SA, relentless in his opposition to apartheid at mass rallies, church meetings and student marches.

Today, with the government he fought for in power, the Arch is not changing his tune. He is a priest and prophet, and his job is to deal with unpalatable truths, no matter at whom they are directed. It pains Tutu to castigate his own. He suffered when Winnie Madikizela-Mandela could not say sorry. He suffers when he sees the ruling elite enriching itself at the expense of the poor. He suffers when people die of AIDS with little being done about it.

Tutu continues to do what God wants him to do: to be a prophet regardless of the consequences, continuing in the footsteps of those who have gone before, of those who were persecuted by their own for their allegiance to God and the truth.

Like Daniel, who was thrown into the lion’s den for his prescience and his commitment to God, so too is Tutu being thrown into the den of African National Congress (ANC) loyalists intent on bringing him down a peg or two. This Nobel laureate is being vilified for warning us gently that we are straying from the very ideals that brought us our liberation.

And what does he get? Comrades who use every tactic in the ANC book to discredit him. ‘He was never a member of the ANC; he has scant regard for the truth; he does not know what he is talking about; he is ignorant and uninformed’ they say. The most preposterous of all accusations comes from Butana Komphela, chairman of the portfolio committee on sport, claiming Tutu’s views of transformation in sport amount to high treason. And that from a laaitie who probably was not even born when Tutu started his opposition to white domination! It all sounds very much like PW Botha, who not so long ago called Tutu ‘a demagogue in bishop’s robes’.

Bishops should not belong to political parties. For Tutu, loyalty to God and to issues of justice precede loyalty to the party. When one reads Tutu’s collection of sermons and his experiences in politics as a priest, one realises that he, unlike many of the struggle priests, remained true to his calling. Throughout his career, he chose God above Mammon.

In his preface to the book Aliens in the Household of God, Tutu reveals a man very few of us know – an unusual response from an elder breaking new ground in his compassionate, Christ-like response to the issue of homosexuality. Why is the Anglican church kicking up so much polemical dust about a matter Tutu has total clarity on? Tutu is a mensch and any attempt to vilify him will boomerang.

I have seen many marches where Tutu locked arms with other religious leaders – such as Bishop Mvume Dandala, the Rev Lionel Louw, the Rev Colin Jones, the Rev Allan Boesak, the Rev Chris Ahrends, the Rev Frank Chikane, Rabbi Cyril Harris, Imam Gasant Solomons, Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa and the Rev Courtney Sampson – against the repressive apartheid state.

I have yet to see one of these clerics come out in defence of him. The courage that prevailed before 1994 has dissipated, with the clergy seeking greener pastures in the secular world, reluctant to criticise lest they jeopardise their chances of benefiting from the state’s largesse. Herein lies the demise of the prophetic voice, kept alive mainly by Tutu.

Ramaphosa’s rich talents equip him for top office

Business Day July 27 2006

I AM glad that Cyril Ramaphosa’s name has been added to the list of African National Congress (ANC) presidential hopefuls for 2007. His candidature would be a pleasant neutraliser to the alternatives, who are too ghastly to contemplate. Many might unfairly disqualify him on the grounds that he is too rich for the job and that he might use his economic power to enrich himself even further, or use it to leverage resources for his empowerment pals or the ANC, in the same way that Silvio Berlusconi, tycoon and prime minister of Italy, became notorious.

Berlusconi was a prime example of how a convergence of business and political interests is bad in politicians. Big business, at the best of times, behaves like a whore. It attaches its body to any government as long as it can use it to further its own ends.

The evidence since 1994 has been disconcerting. The very same businesses that sucked up to the apartheid government are now cosying up to the ANC and have been quite ruthless in using the ruling party in a system of patronage that is rather embarrassing to behold.

For every corrupt politician, there is a corrupter, and complicit businesses often recede quietly into oblivion when corruption is exposed, with the government portrayed as the only villain in the transaction.

Big business in Zimbabwe generally supported Robert Mugabe to the hilt until they could no longer sustain the relationship and left quietly when his largesse dried up.

Ramaphosa’s political credentials are well known and I need not list them here. But what needs to be emphasised is that while his rapid rise to wealth keeps being mentioned, people forget his proven track record as head of the Constitutional Assembly. His management of the constitutional process during a tight schedule from June 1994 to May 1996 is worth the highest order SA can bestow on anybody.

Putting together a constitution in a politically fractured country was a new and risky undertaking for SA. Politics was volatile and even though the 1994 election was relatively peaceful, tensions remained. The right wing had just emerged from a brutal destabilisation process; similarly, the resistance movement had to cease all revolutionary activity.

Politicians were still fighting about the property clause; the issue of abortion and customary rights threatened to derail gender solidarity; the debate around proportional versus the constituency-based electoral systems was heated; federalism versus centralised control provoked divergent responses; yet Ramaphosa held the process together with his amiable, gentle, yet decisive demeanour.

His relationship with Roelf Meyer was legendary. He managed the wide chasm between the ANC, the National Party, the Democratic Party, the Freedom Front, the Pan Africanist Congress and others with aplomb.

He could defuse the growing tension between divergent views with even a lame joke and have everyone in stitches. He pulled in the expertise and resources of the best constitutional experts into the six theme committees and I shall never forget the flurry of activity, debates, conferences and workshops between the politicians and the nongovernmental organisations trying to get to grips with what a truly representative South African constitution would be, with a Bill of Rights that would be unique to SA.

What this entire exercise demonstrated was the willingness of political actors across wide divisions to work together and reach a compromise. People whom many of us wrote off as dinosaurs were now in the fold and talking to each other. Four months before the May 8 1996 deadline, 68 issues were unresolved and there was great concern that the deadline would not be reached. Even by April 22 1996 there was no consensus on the death penalty, the appointment of judges and the attorney-general, language, local government, proportional representation and the floor-crossing issue.

By April 1996, there had been 298 amendments but the entire process went swimmingly under Ramaphosa’s capable leadership, so that by May 8 1996 the text was completed. March 1997 was the culmination of a difficult process, ending with more than seven million copies of the constitution distributed in eleven languages all over the country.

For these reasons, Ramaphosa is ideally suited to bring that experience to bear on bringing the ANC together again, with its political contenders, into an inclusive society united in its goal to drag SA out of poverty.

Ramaphosa has economic power. What he wants now, it seems, is political power, not for its own sake, but to use it to take SA in a different direction – eliminating economic inequality, creating a culture of tolerance, and building a healthy civil society that will work together to support and sustain a different kind of democracy to the one we have now.

He would not hesitate to bring committed activists and experts back into the fold to utilise their skills in ways that would benefit SA. The task is not easy, given that he is perceived to be a ruthless Randlord, but I hope that by now he is so tired of making money that he will truly focus on the poor, the unemployed, the landless and the huge army of HIV-infected people.

Lest I forget, Ramaphosa had a fair amount of political groupies who swooned over him, obeying his every beck and call. Everyone wanted his attention and while he loved the grovelling, work got done around him. If he stands for president, we might just be in for one of the most exciting dispensations this country has seen. I am sure the country will rally around him despite some minor misgivings.

Sisulus embodied noble principles

Business Day August 5 2003

‘He towers above all of us with his humility and intrinsic dignity.’ – Nelson Mandela. Walter Sisulu’s passing, sadly, is the beginning of the end of an era in the African National Congress (ANC).

Described as a postmodern feminist by his daughter-in-law, Elinor Sisulu, one can comfortably call him the grande dame (I don’t know the male version) of ANC politics. Amina Cachalia called him a selfless, nonmaterialistic comrade, a sentiment echoed by Ahmed Kathrada. George Bizos praised him for his sacrificial service, a model to young people, who would do well to imitate him.

Former president Nelson Mandela movingly talks about how their lives were intertwined for the past 62 years. ‘We shared the joy of living, and the pain. Together we shared ideas, forged common commitments. We walked side by side through danger and tribulation, nursing each other’s bruises, holding each other up when our steps faltered. Together we savoured the taste of freedom. His absence has carved a void. A part of me is gone.’

What an epitaph.

Mandela’s pain at losing a bosom pal is poignant and one senses his apprehension that Sisulu’s death signals the slow demise of a camaraderie typical of comradeship in those days.

Reading Sisulu’s history, one cannot help but notice that he was born, ironically, the year that the ANC was formed. He had a difficult young life, moving from job to job to survive. His quest for dignity as a black man automatically attracted him in 1940 to the ANC – the home then of the marginalised and oppressed.

Those were difficult times, the decade before and after the Nationalist Party took over. Sisulu’s militancy and uncompromising nature were understandable given the tyranny with which resistance was met.

His life was a product of turbulent times, yet he remained a devout family man, husband and comrade throughout his life of hardship. The ‘50s and early ‘60s were marked by police intimidation, harassment and imprisonment, culminating in the treason trial in 1963.

In looking at this eventful life, one cannot help but link Sisulu with his wife Albertina, a stalwart partner who encouraged him to continue his political commitments through the ANC Women’s League and the Federation of SA Women when he was banned.

A great political couple, they complemented each other. They managed to keep marriage and family together despite the disruptions and threats to their lives. Their intense political involvement enriched their family in ways that we will never be able to measure. While Sisulu was in jail, Albertina’s small nursing salary provided for seven children, her own five and two of her sister-in-law’s. As a member of the Federation of SA Women, she was jailed while still breast-feeding her ten-month-old baby, banned for five years and placed under house arrest for ten years.

In 1981, Albertina was arrested for speaking at the funeral of Rose Mbele, one of her patients. At the trial she was even blamed for the ANC flag that draped Mbele’s coffin. The judge’s statement at her sentencing signalled how the law at the time saw her and Walter as one: ‘You allowed yourself to be used by the ANC by allowing yourself to be introduced to the public as Mrs Walter Sisulu, the people’s secretary.’ She was sentenced to four years in prison for being Mrs Sisulu.

The Sisulu history is an example of an effective and heartwarming political symbiosis, of a couple who embodied the noble principles of the Freedom Charter and what the ANC represented. In a cynical world where marriages and relationships don’t last, the Sisulu partnership, under extremely difficult and trying circumstances, is writ large on the political canvas of history.

We say hamba kahle to an ANC cadre who gave the movement the grace, dignity and humility I hope will be kept alive with renewed vigour in the party. In the words of Bizos: ‘SA has lost a great man. He has left us with a legacy of what it means to be a great citizen.’

What you sow, you shall reap

Mail & Guardian April 2 to 8 1999

I wish to respond to Farid Esack’s condemnation of Judge John Foxcroft’s ruling against Allan Boesak (‘Used and discarded like a condom’ , Mail & Guardian March 26 to April 1 1999). As a religious teacher and gender commissioner whose primary concern should be with establishing the rule of law and morality in a country where crime is the order of the day, he sets worrying precedents.

Esack knows he is treading on dangerous ground, hence he seeks conscious justification for illogical arguments. His basic argument is, given Boesak’s stature and the horrors of apartheid, Boesak’s crime pales into significance, hence he should not have been sentenced. And what right has this judge of yesteryear to judge our inimitable cleric?

Boesak has been condemned by many as yet another senior ANC official found guilty of theft and fraud. More seriously, a point missed by many, the man is a highly trained theologian and dominee, who strayed from his calling through his lust for power, money and women, in that order.

Ironically, his conviction coincides with that of the president of the Baptist Church in the United States who was found guilty of fraud of enormous proportions. The difference, however, is that the Baptist president publicly apologised to his wife, children, church and nation for his misdemeanours. There was not one iota of remorse and repentance in the fibre of Boesak’s being.

The tragedy about Boesak is that his attraction to Mammon made him forget that his talents lay elsewhere. And a gifted theologian he was. As a chaplain of the University of the Western Cape in the 1980s, he never lacked an audience. I, too, was astounded at his polished enunciation of one of the complex utterances of Jesus: ‘I come to bring a sword not peace.’ The man, therefore, is to be pitied for, like a Shakespearean tragedy, his fall has been occasioned by his lust for power, regardless of all his other talents.

It was clear to many in the struggle that his intoxication with his meteoric rise to power would be the seed of his destruction. If he ‘felt called to be an instrument in the hands of God’, why did he succumb to the temptations of the world? To be called and to feel used are different things, and reflect Esack’s muddled thinking. Boesak cannot be a victim while also wanting to be an instrument.

While his oratory skills and courage were not doubted, Boesak engineered his own leadership and his own detention in ways that kept many dinner conversations going. There was a way in which apartheid forced greatness on all us, and Boesak’s ego was ready bait for this. Why this sudden emphasis on his exceptional leadership when many of his friends gossiped endlessly about his newfound opulence, his self-conscious vanities and his affairs?

As a humble cleric, with a sudden rise to fame and easy access to funds, he sowed the seeds of his downfall by submitting to pleasures of the flesh. And for this he is solely to blame. Beyers Naudé, Desmond Tutu, Cosmos Desmond, Paul Verryn and many other struggle priests did not let the side down.

Boesak was indeed called, but refused to listen, unlike Tutu, who regardless of whatever situation he found himself in, stuck to his calling. While Tutu can be criticised for often failing to distinguish between his role as a secular head of a state institution, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and as a priest, he should be respected and lauded for never reneging on his calling. Boesak strayed and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. What’s more, he gets support from key people in society whose rise to power have equally blinded them to what is right and what is wrong.

Boesak deserved the sentence meted out to him because he stole from the poor to enrich himself. Analogies with the sentence meted out to Angelina Zwane’s killer are opportunistic at best. When Freddie Steenkamp was jailed for six years for a similar offence, there was not a peep of support from politicians and sympathisers. No, because he was the skelm, not Boesak, and he was responsible for Boesak’s downfall.

But now that Judge Foxcroft has proven otherwise, the analogy is expediently used in the media to urge the transformation of the judiciary. So the judge becomes the villain, and is implied to be racist, an instrument of the untransformed judiciary.

The judiciary is there precisely to guard against public pressure and mob justice. All who are found guilty of crime should be treated fairly, a basic tenet of the constitution. Justice is no respecter of title, and one’s struggle credentials should in no way exonerate one from the application of the law.

To suggest Boesak is the ‘fall guy’ is to deny his own agency in his downfall. To link his sentence with Cassinga, Lusaka, Gaborone, Sharpeville, etcetera, and amnesty for murderers and political criminals, is to miss the point and blame the judiciary for the political compromise made at the World Trade Centre.

It is precisely because of the amnesty provision that it is incumbent upon us, especially on human rights activists, to uphold the rule of law and to seek its enforcement equitably.

Esack fails dismally in trying to make a case for Boesak by invoking inappropriate analogies. In this exercise he deliberately suspends his logic for reasons that are understandable, but totally unacceptable.

Boesak is not the first great man who has fallen. The great king David also did, but he said, ‘Woe is me for I have sinned.’

Boesak seems to have forgotten Christ’s warning that what you sow you shall reap. Hopefully he will ruminate upon these words during his quiet times in prison. Or perhaps, by some stroke of political manoeuvring, incarceration might escape him too. This, I fear, is the intention of Esack’s article.