Zuma's homage to Biko seeks to fill abyss left by ANC's exhausted ideology

17 September 2017 - 00:00 By barney mthombothi

President Jacob Zuma this week laid a wreath at the very spot in the Pretoria prison where the bruised and battered body of Stephen Bantu Biko drew its last breath. It was a lonely and miserable death for a man who meant so much to so many.
Biko's tormentors were bent on killing an idea. But an idea never dies. It mutates or can lie dormant for years until a soldier comes along and picks it up like it's a spear, which then becomes an even more potent weapon in his educated hand.
It was very kind of Zuma to make the time. But he was 40 years late. Perhaps Marikana would have been a more pertinent, if inconvenient, destination. The widows and the orphans would have appreciated the flowers.Ideas not only inform an organisation's political programme; they instil and stiffen its moral content and ethical conduct. And where ideas are lacking or have taken a back seat, corruption can easily slip in to fill the void. It happened to the NP in the latter part of its reign, and it's a serious affliction of the ANC right now.
Black Consciousness adherents must feel sick to their stomachs to see the ANC sidling up to Biko, whom it had for years caricatured as a racist. Which was always ironic because the ANC only admitted all races as members at its Morogoro conference in 1969, a year after the founding of the South African Students' Organisation by Biko and his band of idealists - with Africans, coloureds and Indians under the black umbrella.
The ANC's vocal hostility towards the BC movement led to pitched battles between supporters of the two groups across the country. Many people died simply because they held a different opinion. To the uninitiated, it will probably come as a surprise to learn that it was not solely the triumph of ideas that ensured victory for the ANC in the end.
Now they're pottering about for ideas again. They tried Bell Pottinger, and that's been and gone. It may have ended in tears, but it's left an acrid and corrosive stench in its wake that will be with us for some time. The ANC's clumsy dalliance with Biko may also be an attempt to steal a march on the EFF, which seems to want to incorporate BC in its repertoire.
There's nothing wrong or untoward in snatching an idea from a friend or a foe. What sticks in the craw about Zuma and his little escapade at Biko's last abode is his equating of himself with Biko, or the suggestion that what Biko endured at the hands of his tormentors or throughout his political life is equivalent to Zuma's own current difficulties. Zuma is clearly smoking something. Biko was tortured and killed for his ideas; whatever agony or distress Zuma may be going through, he brought it on himself.
His comments, crass and self-serving, were obviously uttered in ignorance. Perhaps the little that he knows of Biko or his teachings is what he's been able to pick up from his friends and advisers...

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