Lame ducks and other animals ...
The law of unintended consequences? I think not. Thank you, Nicholson J.
Arsehole. You and Zuma both. You've trashed our democracy, screwed all South Africans, and turned our Constitution on its head. Worse, you've gutted the ANC by allowing Zuma and his thugs to betray the Freedom Charter and the legacies of Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, Lithuli et al.
To hell with Zuma, Malema, Mantashe, Vavi and their fellow travellers. They're worth nothing until they've been mandated by the people and I doubt the electorate would back them in a popular vote. (No, Polokwane was not democracy in action and you know it. Lists are manipulated and votes are bought. Ultimately, the voice of the average branch member is not heard. I attended our first nominations conference and I voted for several hundred people on behalf of my branch.)
More, I've no doubt the average South African will feel enormous anger at what's been done; no matter one's feelings (or lack thereof) for Mbeki. I've had many differences with the man, but he was the leader of the ANC millions elected to power in 1999 and 2004. He was my president and he had four months to serve.
Now this. This is not the way things are done in the ANC. This is not the action of the 'disciplined' movement I joined in the days before democratic rule. This is not the spirit or legacy — nor, I assume, the desire — of Nelson Mandela. This is not what we voted for. In short, this is not the ANC that has done this. The ANC, the ghosts of whom may be felt and heard six feet in the country of the Eastern Cape, are the people of this country.
They are — as is so frequently pointed out, the single mother surviving on a char's wage in a shack in Khayalitsha, the child who attends school in a classroom vandalized by thieves, the skilled assembly line worker putting together the car exported to Australia, the fatwalleted, coke-snorting trader on the floor of the JSE, the HIV-positive woman beaten and raped by rogue cops...
Etcetera. Leadership purports to represent them but, in truth, it can only hope to do so. Today, corrupt beyond measure and the law, I doubt it even wishes to.
But all that's beside the point. Mbeki will survive and we will survive — at great cost. The point remains Nicholson's dumb High Court judgement handed down last Friday.
Funny how, in a country that prides itself on an "independent" judiciary, it was the unwarranted political opinion of a High Court judge in Pietermaritzburg that brought about this travesty.
Jacob Zuma, and all who sail in him, is not my president. Come 2009, you will not find me inside or immediately outside a polling station anywhere in South Africa.
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land | Where justice is a game.
Bob Dylan | Hurricane
