WATCH: An illegal Mozambican foreigner who is a manager at a construction site challenges President Ramaphosa after he announced a deployment of 10k inspectors.
WATCH | SABC News correspondent Sherwin Bryce-Pease brings the latest updates following reports that former president Jacob Zuma’s name appears in newly released documents from the US Department of Justice as part of its latest Epstein files disclosure.
former President Thabo Mbeki is busy rewriting history like as if the rest of us weren’t around to witness it. Suddenly, the ANC’s collapse is Zuma’s fault, or worse, some shadowy MK-era conspiracy with hostel politics and ethnic dog whistles. That’s a convenient story by the old man; pretty dramatic, nostalgic, and neatly distant from the real mess. Anything, it seems, to avoid naming the obvious problem: the Ramaphosa project and the political and economic elite circle that hollowed out the movement while calling it “renewal.” Let's say it as it is and stop whispering in dark corners.
Let’s equally not pretend as if Mbeki’s hands are clean here. His obsession with “stability” didn’t save the ANC at all, rather it fractured it. COPE didn’t also fall from the sky; it was born out of his presidency and died quietly, sure, but the damage lingered, ill-discipline and internal plotting was entrenched. Yet here he is, wagging fingers like an innocent bystander. And don’t get me started on the absurd claim that his vote is a secret in 2016. A whole former ANC president saying that with a straight face is either comedy or contempt; probably both. Knowing very well the headlines would be negative against his own political home, by such ambiguous statement during a hostile and highly contested local government elections. Why couldn't he just fully endorse his party? A party that pushed him to the highest office in the country, henceforth he enjoys lifetime presidential perks.
The real problem is that Mbeki knows people still treat him like the final word on morality, reason and intellect, and he leans into that myth hard. That’s where the dishonesty in my personal opinion creeps in. He selectively forgets how former President Zuma actually rose through a system where loyalty mattered more than principle, where factional protection replaced accountability; a system in the ANC put in place by himself and those around him then who worship the "Chief". That culture didn’t appear overnight rather it was cultivated.
Therefore trying to pin the ANC’s decay on Zuma or MKP alone is lazy analysis at best and deliberate misdirection at worst. It smells like old-school security-state thinking: reduce complex political failures to sinister individuals and imagined plots. Meanwhile, the structural rot which comes with the arrogance of numbers, the gatekeeping, the elite consensus politics; all gets a free pass.
Mbeki doesn’t get to skip his chapter in this story. His legacy is part of the problem, whether he likes it or not. You can’t light the match, walk away, and then lecture everyone about the fire. The elephant isn’t Zuma. It’s the leadership culture that normalized decay, and until that’s confronted honestly, no amount of revisionism will deodorize the past.
Time to stop spinning and start owning it. Making Zuma the villain is so simplistic and unfortunately doesn't address the entrenched problem the movement is actually facing. #ANC114 🖤 💚 💛