I listened to a clip from an interview with a white female writer who questioned the value of the present president of the country. She asks openly why he was seen to be acting in the interest of whites rather than the blacks who saw him as a messiah.
During the discussion, a fellow panellist suggested that Cyril Ramaphosa was a white man who was painted black.
The clip also posits the notion that the late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a more “natural” choice for the presidency.
Also, that Ramaphosa, despite a short membership life with the ANC, was mistakenly elected in the first place. Was he not a mole placed by the whites to disrupt the ANC?
Even more horrifying, the lady writer asked why Ramaphosa wasn’t doing more for the blacks instead of being seen to promote what she called “white supremacy”.
If Ramaphosa is not doing anything for the blacks, and as such is seen to be a failure, this lady should be reminded that much of the task he seems to be neglecting was straightening out the mess that whites have made of black lives.
This self-righteous judgement of a black president smacks of the mealie-mouthed, sanctimonious, self-justification which is the cornerstone of an undeserved and totally erroneous notion of white superiority.
Ramaphosa is wooing white money because it provides the funding that his party members can’t.
Instead, they strip the fiscus and leave him with unrealistic goals and unfulfilled promises.
The same flaw was built into the great Madiba’s dream. He wanted education, health care, old age care and all of the good things promised by the election of a government of national unity in 1994.
But Mandela had a dream that wasn’t properly funded. It died. It is not a Ramaphosa thing.
In this country, a good president has to listen to the mantra of my personal black thought leader: Njabulo Ndebele. He advised, in 1983, that angry, politically-fuelled township poets turn their pens away from recrimination and redefine their relevance.
Whatever that means to you is not for me to question. The lesson I see in what he said wasn’t new. We had already, up to that point, wrongly believed that the theory of evolution claimed that the fittest will survive. Not so. The theory suggested very strongly that the creature who could countenance and accommodate change would survive.
That is the point of my article. Apportioning blame and providing cleverly-contrived polemic, or choosing between a priori and priori philosophical lenses, is no more than the smoke-screen of white cruelty and notions of supremacy.
Neither the blacks nor the whites have shown any recognition of the salutary effects of a willingness to change.
We changed names of streets and towns. We even allowed a few bigoted Calvinist thugs to establish their own republic under the aegis of a tolerant and democratic republic. We sold ourselves out long ago by sitting with our tormentors and negotiating a peaceful settlement.
What did it get us? An eternal ethic of denial as to where the problem lies.
To govern is merely, in a very reductionist sense, the right to collect other people’s money and spend it so that you serve the notion of a good life for all.
That is so much malarkey, because the imperatives that drive that society still have the profit motive as its engine. It’s called capitalism.
Ramaphosa is merely appeasing the white electorate with promises of soft treatment provided they go on funding his payments to colonial-historical debtors (a major act in double-dealing), while allowing loyal party members to steal the rest of those funds with impunity. All you need is a party membership card.
It doesn’t depend on Ramaphosa or journalists who are now arguing “correctly”. We need to cleanse ourselves individually and ask what we can do to guide these misguided leaders.
It’s a new year. It calls for new thinking. What can you, as individual, do for your country?
* Alex Tabisher.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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