There is no Messiah – you are your own liberator
My experience is that middle-class South Africa is often in search of a Messiah. There is none. It’s not [deputy president] Cyril Ramaphosa. Or EFF leader Julius Malema. Or DA leader Helen Zille. The lesson of our past is that ordinary people in unity for the right cause remain the most powerful force in the world. Each of us is own leader. And our own liberator.
My lack of trust in elected politicians does not mean I don't know that the phrase and the moment of #Paybackthemoney has altered our politics completely. #Paybackthemoney is a campaign started by the Economic Freedom Fighters in August in response to Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's recommendation that President Zuma repay some of the undue benefit he accrued due to the renovations of his presidential estate at Nkandla.
The slogan placed the battle against corruption centre-stage, which is where it should be. Until then, a huge ANC was able to railroad its way through too many scandals. I think here of the arms deal, of Chancellor House [the ANC’s business arm] and Guptagate [the illegal landing of a jet containing large numbers of the family and friends of the Gupta dynasty at the military’s Waterkloof air-base]. These are the pockmarks on our way to being a just-like-the-others emerging market.
Each of those scandals ended in no justice and confined largely to history’s unaccountable dustbin.
Nkandla will not go the same way because of the #Paybackthemoney campaign and it may serve the purpose of raising the public appetite against a cancer which I am not sure we can excise. South Africa is deeply corrupt – R40bn is misused annually in the public service and collusive practices in the private sector are shown to increase the wealth gap.
via www.news24.com
Please read the whole speech. We need to stand up as business and as tax payers against this tyranny. If not we are complicit in the rot.
Ferial continues with:
We are in a phase of political leadership that is neither visionary nor united. Increasingly, I find that we are in a phase of leading from the middle where a society is moved by forces that are not political. I don’t even think that those forces are business right now. That sector is running scared – cowed by former president Thabo Mbeki and sidelined by President Zuma, it has no idea of how to be a citizen in South Africa in the 21st century. I think our moral high-ground and global reputation is held by civil society and by the creative sector. Here, I find South Africans pushing the edge: be it at the Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg; the Soweto Theatre; David Tlale’s studio and Kirsten Goss’s jewellery. Or perhaps Cassper Nyovest and KO – our hip-hop movement is right up there, giving Kanye a run for his money.
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