JUSTICE MALALA | ANC elders have seen it all before. Has history taught them nothing?

It is always worth reminding South Africans that we are blessed and cursed at the same time. We are cursed because we achieved our true humanity — the defeat of apartheid — only in 1994, a full 37 years after Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from European colonisation.

The great danger for this country is that we forget we are blessed beyond measure: everyone else made the mistakes that we don’t need to make. Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe or even the baby of the lot, Namibia, all made huge postcolonial mistakes. They were learning. We don’t need to do anything that they have done if it led them into a cul-de-sac. We are fools if we repeat their mistakes.

We are the lucky ones. We have been shown the way. It’s a bit like being the last car in a convoy on the newly minted Winnie Mandela Drive in Joburg. The vehicles ahead of you are avoiding the potholes (and there are so many on that dastardly road that was, until last week, known as William Nicol Drive), so you just have to follow them and keep your wits about you to not damage your car.

So our job as a country is simple: we must study. We must know what others did so that we use the best of their practices and avoid their mistakes. As the wise old saying by George Santayana goes: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Yet we are a country of fools and dunderheads. We do not read, and we do not learn. We are a cliché, really. We are making the exact same mistakes that others made in the 1960, 1970s and 1980s.

If you were to ask any half-awake formerly exiled member of the ANC whether what they saw while in exile was in any way different from what South Africa is going through today, more than five decades later, they would shake their heads with a certain measure of desperation and shame. Their despair would be because they have seen all this corruption and incompetence before, and they know where it leads.

The old men and women of the ANC have seen it all before. They have seen how the most admirable freedom fighters turn into what their oppressors used to be.

ANC members like Snuki Zikalala, Mavuso Msimang, Thabo Mbeki, the late Aziz Pahad, who was laid to rest on Saturday, and many others have seen liberators turn into greedy, kleptocratic elites. They have seen what it means to allow your institutions of accountability collapse. They have seen how policies meant to uplift ordinary citizens have been implemented cynically to enrich the elite.

When these men and women read about tenderpreneurs who take on a job like fixing the Hammanskraal water works but just chow the money and don’t do the work, they remember that they have seen the same greedy tenderpreneur in Nigeria or in Malawi. When they see that same tenderpreneur funding their own party, they know that there was once a similar tenderpreneur in Zambia or in Zimbabwe, who did the same for Zanu-PF. They also know that the Zambian tenderpreneur learnt his nefarious activity from the oligarch in Moscow or the defence contractor in Washington DC.

The old men and women of the ANC have seen it all before. They have seen how the most admirable freedom fighters turn into what their oppressors used to be. They gaze upon their comrades in the ANC in the various municipalities and in national and provincial governments and, believe me, they know. They have seen it all before. Those who read have heard it all before. South Africa is almost banal, boring, in just how predictable it is, in just how unintelligent it is, in the way it is following blindly on a path it does not need to follow on. Others have done this. We can make different, informed, wise choices, given that others have made our mistakes for us.

But we are the dunderheads. We are the ones who don’t read. History teaches us nothing. You can see this every day. We make good policies, but we don’t lift a finger to implement them. Ten years ago, we drew up the National Development Plan but have done nothing to make it work, meaning that we are now hopelessly behind on ever achieving its targets. Over the past two months National Treasury has warned that we are broke, but we keep making populist promises of more social grants and free health care when we know the cupboards are bare, and we are broke. Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe; they have all been on this populist road before. Why are we repeating the same mistake?

Don’t get me started on the roads. Last week we renamed a road in the name of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Yet look at how filthy Pixley ka Isaka Seme (the founder of the ANC) Street in Joburg is. This is what dunderheads do — you can’t clean a street, yet you spend a quarter of a million rand to rename another whose potholes you cannot fix.

This road leads to a place we all know. It’s called nowhere.