JUSTICE MALALA | The days of the ANC's free pass are over

Imagine you are drowning.

Someone throws you a rope to hold on to so they can drag you to safety. Instead of holding on tightly so you can get to shore, you open your mouth and demand to know if the lifesavers are the same religion as you are, or the same nationality, or the same sex. Or whatever.

There is only one way this story ends. If you open your mouth to ask such stupid questions, you will drown. You will die.

Or, in a second scenario, you take the lifeline and are pulled to shore. Once recovered, instead of changing your ways, you go back to doing stupid stuff like jumping into deep water without a life jacket when you know you can’t swim. You will drown again.

The ANC is that idiot in the water. Because of its idiocy, it will lose the 2029 election. When the party lost its 30-year majority in the May 29 elections, it needed a lifeline to stay in power. The DA threw it that lifeline and the ANC has held on to power since then.

That stay in power has been on the understanding that the ANC will renew itself and dump the practices that made 60% of voters reject it in May. It was hoped that the ANC would listen to the cries of the populace and become a little bit more responsive to them.

The message did not get through. The ANC has not changed. It behaves in the same way it has in the past. Indeed, given what it knows about people’s disillusionment, one could argue that it is just showing the country the finger.

There was a time when the ANC could get away with such outrageous behaviour and it would get a free pass. It was, after all, the party of liberation and the architect of the 1994 breakthrough. It was, after all, the party of the great Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela. Those days are gone. Times have changed. The population has changed.

But the ANC has not realised that our world and our country have changed and that its free pass has been revoked. It is living on borrowed time.

This week President Cyril Ramaphosa reshuffled his cabinet. He put the scandal-soaked Thembi Simelane in the human settlements portfolio, removing her from the justice ministry where she has, for five months, been the boss of the people who have been investigating her for corruption.

Ramaphosa knows, and every ANC member knows, that Simelane’s stay in cabinet is a scandal and is untenable. Yet he does not have the spine to remove her and protects her the way the ANC has done with its corrupt cadres for years.

We are stuck with this minister for years to come. By failing to fire her, Ramaphosa shows his weakness in his own party and his disdain for the people who voted him into power. Did he even have the courtesy of asking his coalition partners about this?

He is making a grave mistake. The people are watching and listening. They know the day will soon come when they will be the bosses. Watch, first, the local elections in 2026. The ANC is going to get the walloping of its life.

That will be a curtain raiser. Ramaphosa should look at the “incumbency revolution” that swept across the world this year. In Botswana, the Botswana Democratic Party is out after 58 years. In Mozambique and Namibia the liberation parties have either stolen the elections or won by the thinnest margin. In Zimbabwe the Zanu-PF party has stolen elections since 2008, including last year’s. In the US the Democrats are out. In India the party of Narendra Modi suffered setbacks.

The ANC is next. It will go down because it is not listening to the message of May 29. Ramaphosa and the ANC behave today as if they won the election. They are more arrogant than when the party had a two-thirds majority in 2004.

Take the issue of illegal immigration, for example. Parties such as ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance have gone to town on it. Now, people like me can say these are xenophobic parties and all kinds of things, but the truth is that people on the ground are seeing and feeling the impact of illegal immigration in their communities. If the ANC is quiet, as it has been, the space is wide open for populists and others to step in.

Other parties are stepping in and filling the void slowly. Watch this space. They will grow in 2026. They will win in 2029.

The ANC will squeal and squeak in 2029, but it will have no-one to blame except itself. It has squandered its mandate for 30 years. Given a lifeline in May this year, it ignored it and behaved with the arrogance of the past.

It will continue to take in water to its burning lungs. Then it will lose power in 2029. Like many other liberation organisations, it may never live again.

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