Quote of the week
Mr Zuma is no ordinary litigant. He is the former President of the Republic, who remains a public figure and continues to wield significant political influence, while acting as an example to his supporters… He has a great deal of power to incite others to similarly defy court orders because his actions and any consequences, or lack thereof, are being closely observed by the public. If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law. As this Court noted in Mamabolo, “[n]o one familiar with our history can be unaware of the very special need to preserve the integrity of the rule of law”. Mr Zuma is subject to the laws of the Republic. No person enjoys exclusion or exemption from the sovereignty of our laws… It would be antithetical to the value of accountability if those who once held high office are not bound by the law.
Secretary of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including Organs of State v Zuma and Others (CCT 52/21) [2021] ZACC 18
What kind of enemy are you?
We must also recognise the reality that this situation makes it very easy for some who might have been inspired temporarily to attach themselves to the ascendant revolution to change their positions. This includes those who might find greater comfort among, and in the positions advanced by a necessarily sophisticated opposition to the political vanguard of national democratic revolution, in the aftermath of the victory of the democratic revolution.
It also encompasses those who, for partisan reasons, might find themselves acting in collusion with the ideological opposition forces which would consciously avoid presenting themselves as opponents of the national democratic revolution, while openly positioning themselves as adversaries of the vanguard movement of the national democratic revolution.
Now I am wondering where I fit in. I am surely not one of those “enemies” who feel more comfortable with the “sophisticated opposition” than with my previously beloved ANC and has therefore felt the need to switch sides.
I don’t even believe that there is a sophisticated opposition in South Africa – unless one includes civil society opposition groups like the Treatment Action Campaign, of course. Characters in the official opposition (think Theuns Botha and Dougie Gibson) are about as sophisticated as a sheep farmer from Putsonderwater and I would feel very uncomfortable to share a room with them – let alone a party.
But now that I have called the national democratic revolution a load of codswallop, I am clearly also not an “enemy” “consciously not presenting myself as an enemy” of said revolution while opposing the ANC’s vanguard role in it.
O dear, I suppose the learned writer forgot to include those of us who are “enemies” of the ANC because we shockingly believe that the aim of political parties in our democracy should ideally be to change (for the better) the social and economic conditions under which especially poor and marginalised people live, while respecting and expanding the rights and freedoms that individuals need to even begin to make important life choices.
We are obviously enemies who, under the guise of supporting social and economic transformation of the masses of our people, wish to limit the power of the ANC to tell us what to think and say and do.
What kind of enemy of the ANC and the national democratic revolution are you?
