The Financial Times dedicated its editorial on Tuesday to South Africa, under the damning headline "South Africa's descent into despotism must stop". It suggested that South Africa needed to look to Brazil and South Korea for lessons in how to doggedly pursue citizen mobilisation and remove a president.
It is right. Citizen action is needed to hold government to account and mobilise against state capture that threatens to engulf us.
How is it that we lost our way so badly and how can we draw on the work of the transition, those early halcyon days of democracy and the constitution-making process to map our mistakes and our progress?
In these times of cul de sac politics and dangerous men and women who wield power, one wonders what the role of an Idasa-type organisation might have been?
Idasa would have turned 30 this year but closed its doors in 2013.Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine, opposition MPs in "the last white parliament", founded Idasa in 1987. Both men sensed the impasse of the late '80s was crippling. Idasa sought to bring that "mutually hurting stalemate" to an end by building dialogue between the Afrikaner establishment and the ANC in exile and within South Africa.In 2005, after lobbying for the regulation of private donations to political parties, Idasa sued the ANC and four other opposition parties to reveal their sources of private funding.
Looking back over the past 12 years and the many corrupt donations, one wonders whether our politics might now have looked slightly different had political donations been regulated? Nevertheless, the court record is a reminder of the corrosive impact of money on the political system...