The ANC, once a beacon of freedom, now faces systemic corruption, says Peter Hain, who urges South Africans to fight back personally.
During the ‘70s and ‘80s, British activist Peter Hain – one of the prime movers in the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and leader of sports boycotts against South Africa – was the man many white South Africans loved to hate, some believing he turned a blind eye to the sins of Africa’s liberation movements.
Those people would do well to cast an eye over Hain’s latest book, Liberation and Corruption, Why Freedom Movements Fail, which is searing in its assessment of how revolutionaries lose their heads and begin looting. Centre stage, unsurprisingly, is our own ANC.
Although born in struggle and propelled by ideals of freedom, justice and dignity, the ANC fell from grace, as did almost every other liberation movement.
Hain writes: “The ANC inherited a systemically corrupt system in apartheid and began looting it for their personal gain. Yet the ANC often claims corruption is a symptom of inequality and poverty.”
But, he added, this is an excuse by those in power to sanctify themselves. “It is a very thin excuse.”
Hain believes the rot started even before democracy arrived in 1994, when “for Zuma and some others… the imperatives of clandestine military operations and infiltration by apartheid security agents created the scope for personal corruption”.
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The repeated warnings of Nelson Mandela about corruption were ignored and Madiba would be “turning in his grave about what the ANC has become today”.
Hain says Western governments and multinationals don’t have clean hands, either, because they either looked on, or were even complicit in the looting of many countries, post-independence.
Are we doomed, though?
Hain notes that, if we want to end corruption, “the individual citizen has to begin by fighting back”, saying no to bribes demanded by cops or home affairs officials.
He adds: “Change is always hard. But it starts with you.”
Hain was right before. He could be right again.
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