Two infections: don’t relax

It’s too early to relax. Covid-19 and the ANC will be with us a while longer, unfortunately. Stay alert, these diseases remain dangerous.

Yet people are increasingly becoming immune to the ANC. Antibodies including #VoetsekANC and #CyrilMustGo have been trending on Twitter. Adriaan Basson, editor-in-chief of News24, says the ANC is unsalvageable. We must prepare for coalitions from 2021, when local government elections are due.

Negative sentiment towards the ANC has reached fever pitch on Twitter, with images of people kneeling to accept gifts from ANC fat cats. Gifts paid for by taxpayers.

Two of the photos have been misleading. They show Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, minister of communications, dressed in designer pseudo-military garb, enjoying attention while an old man kneels for her. She wears new shoes, the old man is barefoot. No masks are worn. On Monday, it emerged the photos are from 2018. The disabled man can’t walk. Ndabeni-Abrahams arranged a wheelchair for him.

This explanation hasn’t dispelled negative comments about the minister’s self-satisfaction. Nor have tweeps forgotten that Ndabeni-Abrahams showed no remorse for contravening lockdown regulations in April, by visiting former deputy minister Mduduzi Manana’s home.

A separate photo shows a masked ANC-clad worthy handing cash to a kneeling man. The photos illustrate the widening gap between the poor and the superrich profiteering off Covid-19 contracts. Basson says the Covid-19 tender process has been “treated as a get-rich-quick bonanza for top ANC leaders and their friends, across faction lines”.

Indeed, all ANC factions are involved. As the party’s secretary-general Ace Magashule says: “Tell me of one leader of the ANC who has not done business with government?”

This contradicts President Cyril Ramaphosa’s stated views against connected families doing business with government, but Magashule knows he is safe. Ramaphosa values party unity above all else.

“I would rather be seen as a weak president than to split the ANC because that is not my mission. My mission is to keep the ANC united,” Ramaphosa told the SABC. This explains Ramaphosa’s ineffectiveness. ANC unity is his priority and the ANC is corrupt. Therefore, he cannot act firmly against corruption. To do so would shatter ANC unity.

ANC cadres won’t prosecute each other. They are thick as thieves, where thick means close-knit rather than stupid, although that can’t be ruled out.

With all this negativity, amid catastrophic unemployment in a junk economy, voters are expected to punish the ANC at election time. When will that election be? Both the ANC and EFF have said the 2021 local government ballot should be postponed until 2024, when national and provincial elections are due. They want unified elections for all three levels of government.

If we are still in any form of Covid-19 lockdown, next year’s elections will be compromised. So the ANC has a further excuse to delay its moment of electoral truth. But it will have to take the medicine some time. We shall recover from the twin infections of the coronavirus and the ANC. Who knows when?

Martin Williams, DA councillor and former editor of The Citizen.

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