They will lie to you, these fake revolutionaries. They will send your children to die in a burning mall, these fake Che Guevaras and fake Marxists, and tell you you are fighting “the struggle”. Then they will put on their Armani suits and sip Veuve Clicquot while you mourn your dead son and pitiable daughter.
I am talking about the fake revolutionaries who sent at least 337 of our people to their undignified deaths in shopping malls, on the streets, in cold and lonely places, in stampedes under the feet of others, while these alleged “leaders” and their families sat in their warm mansions and sent out tweets to inflame, incite and, ultimately, send the poor to their deaths. These people are no different to many others we have seen before — they loot the state, look after their own and use the poor as fodder when the long arm of the law starts getting close to them.
What do you do if you have nothing meaningful to contribute to a society that has set itself specific goals and is achieving them? You create chaos. You undermine and break everything society values until there is nothing but mayhem. Then you force that community to beg you to stop.
Most of our analysis of the circle of avarice called the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the ANC and its hate manufacturers on social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, is wrong. We ascribe a great vision, planning and motives to them. We say they want this or that.
We are wrong. They want chaos. Theirs is a totally different world: selfish, uncaring, cynical and ultimately megalomaniac. It is the world of me, me, me. They don’t care about the poor, the marginalised or the weak. They see such people as mere fodder for their cynical and ruthless grab for power. They want chaos because in disorder they can loot and oppress, and get away with it. Chaos and lawlessness are their natural habitat.
They don’t care about the black people who died in Phoenix. They just want to point at South Africans of Indian origin and inflame racial and ethnic tensions. They seek chaos, not justice. They seek madness, not rationality. They thrive in the sewer.
Take the Twitter feed of former president Jacob Zuma’s daughter, Duduzile Sambudla-Zuma. Two weeks ago this Twitter account was encouraging and applauding the looting and destruction of property taking place across the country. It was one of the first to glorify the torching of trucks on the N2/N3 highway. As the mayhem spread, so did Sambudla-Zuma’s joy in the feed. “We see you!” she tweeted to the looters.
Just days later she acted all outraged about what happened in Phoenix, a predominantly Indian suburb in KwaZulu-Natal, where vigilante groups allegedly killed (by premier Sihle Zikalala’s count) 38 black people. Police minister Bheki Cele has quite correctly appointed a 10-man detective team to investigate and bring those responsible to book.
Now, in my book, the person who encouraged and applauded the mayhem and looting is responsible for the deaths of most, if not all, of the 337 people who died during these riots. If desperately poor people left their cold homes because the daughter of the former president said it’s all right to go out and loot, then who should be responsible? The way I see it, with every tweet and every voice note, these influential people — and Zuma-Sambudla in particular — were doing what the Hutu radio stations did in 1994 in Rwanda.
Every sane, rational person would know this. Zuma-Sambudla should know this. Yet, in their crocodile tears Zuma-Sambudla and her ilk are very happy to go on without accepting that they might bear some responsibility for what happened.
It is the same as EFF leader Julius Malema and his red brigade. These people were applauding Malema when he said if the state deploys troops then he, too, was “joining in”. Joining in what? Looting? Destroying property? What exactly was this serial flip-flopper, who once said he wanted to see Jacob Zuma “suffer”, buying into?
The issue is beyond Zuma’s daughter, of course. It is this entire brigade which styles itself on radical economic transformation. They want chaos. They want mayhem. They want lawlessness. They claim to want justice for the people who died in Phoenix, but do not want justice for the people who suffered for the theft of billions through state capture. Crucially, they want the rest of us to follow them and not get to the serious work of rebuilding the country.
So this past weekend they were jumping up and down, blaming President Cyril Ramaphosa and public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan for the events in Phoenix. The truth is they don’t care about the black people who died in Phoenix. They just want to point at South Africans of Indian origin and inflame racial and ethnic tensions. They seek chaos, not justice. They seek madness, not rationality. They thrive in the sewer.
That is what we are faced with. These people must never come to power again.
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