Being the good professed Marxists that some of them claim to be, the ANC’s leaders seem to have massaged that famous saying of Vladimir Lenin into something more appropriate for present-day South Africa: that commissions are the opiate of the people.
That’s certainly what comes across from ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula’s extraordinary statement this weekend that the party had to agree to the appointment of the Madlanga Commission of Inquiry because to do nothing would have led to a revolt by ordinary South Africans.
And, according to Mbalula, that revolt would have been even worse than the destructive “insurrection” which happened in 2021, when former president Jacob Zuma was briefly imprisoned for contempt of court.
We wonder whether he was implying that because the trigger for the commission came from allegations made by KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner Lieutenant-General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, that people in that province would be most enraged that nothing was being done and take to the streets.
Who knows what goes on in Mbalula’s mind? Because he clearly believes that appointing the commission was some sort of soothing mechanism, we have to wonder whether similar logic has been brought to bear in appointing other organs of inquiry.
Most notably, the Zondo probe into state capture would, in theory, have kept the “people” so intoxicated on the allegations of looting, they would have been satisfied that “something was being done”.
The reality is that none of the big ANC figures linked to repeated claims of diverting state money into their pockets have yet to put on an orange prison uniform.
Could this all be, we wonder, just elaborate smoke and mirrors, allowing the opiate of a commission to lull people into believing justice is being done?
However, the ANC should remember that you can’t drug, or fool, all of the people all of the time.
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