If the ANC lost 'the next day, the country would be burning': Mulder

Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday, Mulder said this would be the case if parties managed to have a coalition that left the ANC as the opposition.

"The next day, the country would be burning. I don’t see the ANC ever respecting that kind of arrangement," he said.

He said the new generation of the ANC would make the country ungovernable should they lose power, but that he would would love to see the party accepting the change though.

Mulder was speaking on the theme, "President for a day".

He said the first major fault line in the current South Africa was that the country had the wrong recipe for nation building and social cohesion. True nation building would only come about when "we stop playing lip service to the slogan 'united in our diversity'."

He called for diversity to be embraced.

Build a new future

“Where does one start to build a new future in a country that was once called a rainbow nation? A land of milk and honey that is now scraping the barrel. Let bygones be bygones. Apartheid is dead, already [for] two decades.”

He said the ghosts of apartheid were still haunting so many people that they forgot to contemplate their future.

Giving examples on how he would improve the country as a president, he said he would create a department of minority affairs to deal with the issues of all minorities.

This would enhance nation building and social cohesion, he said.

He said the power of trade unions also needed to be broken. "Their influence and stranglehold on our economy and government are major contributors to the dire situation we are in today," he said.

Mulder said society had become rotten. "I mean rotten to the core. You can sense the nauseating smell of corruption, nepotism, lawlessness and disrespect for the judiciary. Denial has become a leitmotif of a government that is incapable or unwilling to exercise its responsibility to rule in a just and fair manner on behalf of all its citizens."

He said government still had the audacity to expect taxpayers to foot the bill for their squandering and lavish lifestyles that were seen in the final days of collapsing empires.

He said citizens had to say, "enough".