ANC has become too Self-Righteous for its Own Good

I was a little bit taken aback when I read a brief news item captioned “ANC Condemns Tutu's 'Sacrilege'” (Modernghana.com 4/3/09). The article, reported by Peter Biles, appeared on the website of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and so it must have been deemed to be of great moment by the editors on the Africa Desk at Bush House.

Such significance, or newsworthiness, is almost invariably likely to be predicated on the fact of the newsmaker, the retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, having been knighted Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Still, what caught my attention was the curious use of the rather theological term of “sacrilege.” For the crime that the retired Anglican prelate was being charged by the top-echelon operatives of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) regarded the honest boldness of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in calling out the ANC on what the veteran anti-apartheid advocate deemed to be the party's quite alarming and routine acceptance of the sort of moral blight which, as an outlawed opposition party, the ANC loudly accused the erstwhile white racist apartheid regime, globally, of being culpable of. And, needless to say, rightly or wrongly, much of the world, both civilized and benighted, readily went along with the scorching verdict of the ANC.

After all, who could rationally argue against the moral turpitude reflective of the warped credo of a purportedly democratic regime that cavalierly presumed to incarcerate the titanic likes of Messrs. Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu, among a legion of others, on the rationally and morally unimpeachable grounds that the preceding ANC stalwarts wanted South Africa to be governed by a multi-racial democracy based on the universally accepted principle of “one person, one vote”?

For the racist apartheid regime of the so-called National Party, of course, the cross-racial principle of democratic governance did not, in any way, pertain to that pathetic species of humanity called “Bantu” or in indigenous Africans. At best, the indigenous African, in the racist Afrikaner imagination, was a subhuman species and thus far beyond the pale of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It would take the concerted and synergistic efforts of a determined and morally responsible global leadership and oppressed and wantonly exploited black South Africans and their liberal white and non-black African counterparts to topple the odious culture of apartheid.

Needless to say, through all the preceding, Archbishop Desmond Tutu stood front and center. And so for the ANC leaders to pretend that the retired Anglican prelate of Cape Town does not know what he is talking about, when Bishop Tutu aptly accuses the ruling ANC of behaving almost exactly like the Afrikaner National Party operatives is, indeed, what constitutes a “sacrilege.” And while no intellectually sound observer or avid student of apartheid finds anything remarkably redeeming about the racist culture of apartheid, as fetishistically practiced by the likes of Messrs. Jan Smuts, Henrik Verwoerd and John Vorster, the proverbial peacock attitude of the ANC leadership vis-à-vis the moral integrity and character of Mr. Jacob Zuma, a putative president-in-waiting, gives needless cause for a charitable “re-visioning” of the erstwhile apartheid regime. In other words, the unsavory adamancy of the ANC leadership, and there are remarkable exceptions here, of course, towards the need for the election/appointment of a party spearhead who commands respect and confidence across the broad spectrum of South African society, as it were, is one that must be swallowed with wistfulness, at best, and immitigable regret at the worst.

In the main, Mr. Zuma has been doggedly accused of having facilitated corruption, to the private and exclusive benefit of himself and his close associates, in an arms deal contracted in the name of the South African government, with the French arms manufacturer Thales. Indeed, so bitter a turn did the controversy surrounding the Zuma scandal take that late last year, President Thabo Mbeki was forced out of power by a very influential faction of the ANC harboring an apparently blind support for Mr. Zuma. Mr. Mbeki, at the time of his ouster, had been accused of judicial interference in the Zuma saga. Interestingly, shortly after his ignominious ouster, the very court ruling that had galvanized the Zuma faction against President Mbeki was overturned. But, of course, the proverbial harm had already been done. The latter state of affairs would cause angry Mbeki loyalists to launch a splinter political party called the Congress of the People, which is set to challenge the ANC in South Africa's April 22 presidential election.

At the time of this writing (4/4/09), Agence France Presse (AFP) was reporting from Johannesburg that a National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) announcement on whether to force Mr. Zuma to stand trial on corruption charges, which had originally been scheduled for Friday, April 3, had abruptly been cancelled.

For this writer, however, what makes Mr. Zuma an avoidable presidential liability is the equally scandalous incident in which South Africa's president-in-waiting was accused of raping an HIV-positive fast friend of his daughter's. Not only did Mr. Zuma deny the charge (and was subsequently cleared by a court of law), the ANC capo also lamely acknowledged having engaged in consensual sex with a woman his own daughter's age. The shocker, though, came when the ANC top-dog further claimed that having “unprotected sex” with the HIV-positive woman had not, in any way, endangered his health. Mr. Zuma, like ex-President Mbeki, does not believe that HIV-aids is anything to worry about.

At any rate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu could only aptly be seen to be facilitating the healthy development of a fledgling multi-racial South African democratic culture, when the Nobel Peace Prize laureate forthrightly asserts that: “If he [Mr. Jacob Zuma] is innocent as he has [been claiming, then] for goodness sake, let a court of law say so.” If this remark constitutes a “sacrilege” in the apparently intriguing imagination of the ANC leadership, then South African democracy is, no doubt, in serious trouble.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., was named an Honorary Member of the African National Congress (ANC) while a student at the City College of the City University of New York. He is currently Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].