The atheists among us laugh off promises made by our president on God's behalf. But millions of deeply religious South Africans take Jacob Zuma seriously when he says that a vote for the opposition is a thumbs-up for the devil. Messing with the minds of believers by telling them that the ANC alone can get them into heaven has the whiff of emotional blackmail and intimidation. It's unfair of him to take advantage of voters by pretending he has influence in supernatural places.
We expect politicians to lie, of course. It is part of what they do as individuals and groups all over the world. Here in South Africa, however, our entire society is based on a couple of big, fat fallacies. The first is the ANC's failure to acknowledge that it is not possible to run a municipality, much less a country, without education, skills and experience. The second, parallel whopper is our white community's lack of acknowledgement that it set the ANC up to fail by withholding education, skills and experience while pursuing white supremacy under apartheid.
This complex fusion of deceptions prevails even as vital things in South Africa, like our water and electricity supplies, start to fall apart. If anything, the two unacknowledged issues combine to reinforce the ruling party�s damaging patronage policy despite its obvious deficiencies and the enormity of apartheid's legacy. The twin deceptions also endorse a provocative prejudice among whites that blacks are incapable of running a country, which vindicates racist mindsets.
Perhaps nothing short of an Untruth and Reconciliation Commission will liberate us from these two troublesome fallacies, which incidentally underpin Julius Malema�s stance of pronouncing as if our negotiated settlement of the early Nineties never existed. He remains more-or-less unchallenged within the ANC because so many in its ranks agree with him that whites were let off too lightly.
Assuming there are strategies for averting the politics of revenge down the line (think Zimbabwe) - when, faced with declining popularity at the polls, the ANC ignores its own disastrous choice of cadre deployment rather than professional appointments in government and blames historic sabotage by whites for its failings - the DA is not among them. In fact, the more the DA succeeds at the polls, the closer we come to such politics for the simple reason that it is a predominantly white party, and whites will always be the ANC's scapegoats.
Besides, it's unrealistic to expect South Africa's predominantly black electorate, franchised less than two decades ago, to vote white, regardless of its growing disenchantment with the ANC.
One hopeful way forward might be the revival of the United Democratic Front. A non-racial coalition of civics, church, student, women and workers' groups, it was a highly effective grassroots organization twenty years ago. Then pursuing a strategy of "ungovernability" to defeat the Afrikaner-led National Party, the UDF quickly gained over 3-million members. Early on, it adopted the Freedom Charter as a statement of its aims, though it was never formally linked to the outlawed ANC. Perhaps a relaunched UDF intent this time around on "governability" and, like its predecessor, welcoming anyone who shares its goals, might deliver South Africa from the evil of racialised politics while offering an ideological home to those South Africans of every political persuasion who genuinely want to contribute towards a better-run country rather than to defraud the state in the way that so many of the ANC's current officials have done.
Possible leaders of the new UDF include Cyril Ramaphosa and Jay Naidoo, who were key activists in the forerunner and exceptionally successful individually during the intervening years. Being wealthy already through the leg-up their political connections gave them in the corporate world, they will not need to perpetuate the current political trend of looting the country�s coffers - unlike the recently bankrupt Zuma, who, in only two years at the helm, has shamelessly enriched himself and his relatives at South Africa's reputational expense. (Says economist Moeletsi Mbeki, "The wheelings and dealings of the country's First Family has sent alarm bells ringing even amongst President Zuma's political admirers... The high levels of corruption and incompetence in the public sector... are making South Africa an undesirable destination for domestic and foreign investors.")
Indeed, Zuma has come to symbolize corruption in this country. Most of us thought his relief at getting off earlier criminal charges would have persuaded him to reform his ways. But from the illegally obtained phone records his lawyers used to clear his name on that occasion, to the falsified medical reports with which he sprang a crooked friend from prison, to his ill-gotten iron ore and gold mining shares, not to mention his Congolese oil and South African steel interests, our president is up to his ears in untruths and corrupt deals.
If we are to conquer the runaway corruption that is going to ruin this country, President Zuma has to be persuaded to vacate Mahlambandlopfu as soon as possible. After all, his attempts to silence reporting on the growing scourge are threatening our media freedom, without which we will no longer have a credible democracy. If we want to take the high road to prosperity at long last, South Africans urgently need exemplary leadership. If hell-bent or heaven-sent on the low road, however, we can just continue our decline with the deceitful politicians we've got.