March 23 - President Cyril Ramaphosa visited various communities on the West Coast on Saturday, and also spoke at the Ebenhaeser land claim settlement ceremony in the Matzikama local municipality. Photo: ANC Twitter
The governing ANC can no longer claim the moral compass of the ’60s Sharpeville Day as its sole preserve, according to respected independent political commentator Ralph Mathekga.
Mathekga’s comment comes in the wake of Thursday’s commemoration of Human Rights Day, traditionally known as Sharpeville Day, when scores of unarmed protesters against pass laws were mowed down by apartheid firepower in 1960.
For the first time in history, Thursday saw ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) marking the event in Gauteng’s Vaal township of Sharpeville, although at different venues, a show of strength by the fledgling EFF ahead of the May polls.
The EFF’s presence in Sharpeville, according to Mathekga, demonstrated the party’s “determination to rewrite history”.
“While it is a fact that we had apartheid that ensured the segregation of blacks from whites, people are today worried about what the ANC-led government is doing about load shedding. People are worried about today and not much about yesterday,” said Mathekga.
“In the past, the ANC’s moral compass was beyond reproach, but not any more.
“If one looks at levels of corruption in government, the ANC has a compromised morality and can no longer claim Sharpeville as its own sole preserve.
“A complete disregard for the people that voted it into power since 1994 makes the party to be regarded as having desecrated the memory of Sharpeville.
“It can no longer claim morality on Sharpeville,” said Mathekga.
He said it was expected that in the period running up to the elections, political parties would “desperately try to milk the history of the Sharpeville massacre for their own political ends”.
The latest Eskom power outages, said Mathekga, were likely to be a major factor in determining how South Africans were going to cast their votes in the May elections.
“If you are in the dark under an ANC-led government, you can no longer blame history or apartheid,” said Mathekga.
– brians@citizen.co.za
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