Sometimes Facebook reminds us how good we used to have it.
Today, the reflection took me 11 years back to the days of Jacob Zuma’s fire pool. It’s difficult to believe that back then, we were telling ourselves that it couldn’t get any worse.
Since then, we have had the Zondo Commission for corruption. We had the Nugent Commission for corruption. We had the PIC Commission for corruption. I’m not sure what this Madlanga Commission is for. Probably corruption. All the while, while we hear the stories coming out of the latest commission, we see worse corruption playing out.
Either the president knows about it all, or he has limited knowledge of what’s going on in his own team. Either way, it’s a bad sign.
What took four commissions of inquiry should be resolved by looking at some spreadsheets, but I suppose nobody thought of looking for those under the mattress.
Thuma Mina … now what?
Where is this new dawn, and what has Thuma Mina delivered? The actions of the last decade don’t exactly ring with any application of the song; triumph over poverty? Win the battle against AIDS? Be there for the alcoholic, drug addict, victims of violence and abuse? Where is all of that, Comrade Thuma Mina? Where is the hand you wanted to lend?
It would be a different story if the crackdown on corruption had happened in some way, but if anything, the Madlanga Commission has shown us how much worse it’s gotten.
Lending a hand is great, and all but one of the important qualifiers is that the other hand shouldn’t be directing your peeps to loot the houses of the people you’re lending that hand to.
I’m quite certain that when South Africans signed on for the “working together” narrative, police and syndicate collusion, disappearance of evidence and targeted murders were not exactly what they had in mind. You cannot convince us that those at the top had no idea of this going on.
What’s worse is that there’s ample proof that nobody with any capacity to control it cared enough to do anything about it. How is it that a police service overseen by a whole independent police investigative directorate can get away with so much for so long?
Oh, I know. Maybe it has something to do with the 170-odd investigators needing to monitor over 100 thousand officers. Gosh. What is even the point of trying then?
But that’s the way: claim to have all these lovely oversight entities so that we trust the bodies that they oversee. Only then, break the oversight bodies down to mere names only and get away with no oversight.
Is anybody even surprised anymore? How can they be? When last has anybody experienced a sustained sense of things are looking good since that Seapoint oom with his hands clasped?
The promises of a better life for all aren’t reconcilable with the notion of state officials organising hits.
Capturing 541kg of cocaine only to put it back on the streets for your own profit isn’t exactly law enforcement. Identifying political killings, setting up a task team, then disbanding it tells us you knew there was a problem and you knew who was fueling it. You just didn’t want them to get caught.
And yet, here we are expected yet again to believe that our best interests are in your hands.
Call me cynical, but I don’t think our best interests are served by any leadership that needs a commission of inquiry to tell them what they already know.
Are they too far gone to regain our trust? Who knows? I can’t speak for South Africa. I just know that if the trust of the people is something they want, then perhaps stopping the corruption without the need for a commission would be a good place to start.
