Speakers gun for ‘corrupt Zuma who stole from the poor’

Former ANC MP and global anti-arms trade activist Andrew Feinstein, who was fired from the ANC for challenging the multibillion-rand arms deal scandal, said arms deals had more to do with corruption than with war.

The arms trade thrived because a tiny elite of business and political leaders were making money out of it.

“The world is more peaceful now than ever before, but we sell more weapons,” Feinstein said. The author of the book, After the Party, said the December ANC conference was an opportunity for the ruling party to show that it favoured the people.

“It must ensure that the nation has the politicians it deserved.”

Businessperson and former ANC political activist Sipho Pityana said the ANC conference was about putting icing sugar on a rotten cake.

“When you put icing sugar on a rotten cake and sell it at a lower price, it doesn’t stop it from being rotten,” Pityana said.

He said the ANC did not want to admit it was corrupt. There were good chances that the party would elect at the conference a leadership with records of corruption. “It is unlikely that the trajectory will be different after December.”

South Africans owed it to those who fought for freedom to ensure that the ANC was punished in the  next election, Pityana said. Although he praised the ANC for one of the best constitutions in the world, he said it became corrupt and protected a corrupt president in Jacob Zuma.

“The image of Jacob Zuma has become the image of the ANC.” UDM leader Bantu Holomisa told the gathering that anarchy, criminality and violence would continue under the new ANC leadership elected in December.

“The best thing is not to wait for the 2019 elections. We need to pull up our socks and sort out the rot in our country. The ANC that people trusted has abandoned the original agenda,” Holomisa said.

Gender activist and academic Nomboniso Gasa called for Zuma to be prosecuted and jailed for stealing taxpayers’ money. “He has to wear the orange overall,” Gasa said.

Zuma’s jailing would serve as a lesson that when a leader betrays his people, he must face the consequences. Instead of taking from the rich and giving it to the poor, Zuma stole money from the poor and gave to the rich, Gasa said.

To protect himself from prosecution, Zuma surrounded himself with people who would do as he says in the police and prosecution structures. According to Gasa, the state capture under Zuma has resulted in all state institutions running on autopilot, while the administrative rot had seen people sent to mental institutions to die.

Pityana said the money recovered from state capture must be brought back to the state coffers.

“We are going to face austerity; we are going to go through a hard time to clean up the mess when Zuma is gone,” Pityana said.

“We must have a government that is biased towards the poor. But the state is enemy of the poor, it steals from the poor.”

Pityana said the constitution had a lot of short comings that needed to be dealt with so as to empower the poor.

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