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The ANC has run its course and has reached a dead end from which it is close to impossible for the party to offer South Africans anything of value.
The party has entered a twilight zone from which the only logical step is to plunge into the graveyard of political parties which failed to transform themselves from being liberation movements into political outfits running 21st century economies.
This opinion piece will in all likelihood be hijacked by right-wing racists who will use it to demonstrate that black people are simply not capable of running anything, much less something as complex as a country.
But anyone who knows the history of this country knows that the ANC is more than capable of running a government.
Liberation struggle veteran Mac Maharaj often tells a story of how when it became clear that the criminal enterprise that was apartheid was going to crash, the ANC started conceiving grand plans about what the party would do to improve the lives of black people, once in government.
But following the election in 1994, the founding patriarchs of our democracy were stunned to find the Treasury’s kitty empty.
The National Party’s politicians had plundered every little cent when they saw the writing on the wall. The only thing that the ANC found at Treasury was billions worth of debt which had been racked up by the apartheid regime.
But what followed is nothing short of a miracle. In a matter of a few years the ANC built Treasury and the South African Revenue Service, collected billions in taxes and settled all the previous government’s debt.
So efficient was the ANC with finances that former finance minister Trevor Manuel ran a surplus for a good few years.
So the idea that black people are not able to run anything efficiently is propaganda conjured up by a band of racists who have a frosty relationship with facts.
But the point of this opinion piece is that that ANC of the early mid 90s to early 2000s is gone.
The ANC that overcame perilous times in exile to deliver democracy is gone.
It has been replaced with an incredibly corrupt regime, first under former president Jacob Zuma and now Cyril Ramaphosa.
So reprobate is Ramaphosa’s ANC that it saw nothing amiss with appointing Cassel Mathale as the deputy minister of police.
Mathale was premier in Limpopo when in December 2011 Pretoria placed a record five departments under administration after they collapsed under the weight of theft.
Not a single politician or civil servant has been arrested and forced to account for their crimes in Limpopo.
The primary reasons why I think the ANC has run its course is because Zuma and Ramaphosa crash everything they touch.
In the very late 90s as a teenager in Soweto I used trains to commute to school.
At the time Metrorail was under Transnet.
I recall that if I was a minute late, I missed train number 9022 which stopped at Naledi Station at 7am every morning.
The train was never late, not once.
The Metrorail that the ANC inherited from the apartheid regime worked.
The ANC has disemboweled Metrorail, which is now run by the Passenger Rail Association of South Africa (Prasa).
Under Prasa, thugs have incinerated hundreds of trains, causing damage running into billions.
Today’s trains run without windows, doors and even brakes.
Trains are always late. Quite often they don’t show up at all.
Thugs have vandalised stations and removed railway lines in order to sell off the steel as scrap metal. Returning Metrorail to what it was in the late 90s – if that will ever happen – will cost billions.
Where will the money come from?
In the mid 2000s South African Airways (SAA) made profits of close to a billion.
Today the airline is on the verge of collapsing. In fact, it is now not a case of whether or not SAA will crash, it is a matter of when.
The ANC let SAA crash and it will cost a significant amount of money to rescucitate SAA. Where will those billions come from?
Just as recently as 2012, Eskom posted profits amounting to over R12 billion.
Eight years down the line the power utility is sitting with a staggering debt totaling over R400 billion.
The ANC government let Eskom crash and sink because of corruption.
As it is, Eskom presents the biggest risk to this economy.
Where will the billions to fix Eskom come from? The ANC has no answers.
In 2012 the SABC posted a R343 million profit. In October last year, the SABC received a R2.5 billion from government.
It is all thanks to the ANC.
Transnet, the biggest government company by far, is the only one owned by the public which has a healthy balance sheet and is fairly stable.
But the amount of corruption at Transnet places the sustainability of the company at risk.
Whenever corruption at Transnet is mentioned what comes to mind is the 1064 locomotives involving the Gupta family.
But the procurement of the locomotives pales in comparison with the corruption involving the allocation of train capacity to transport general cargo or manganese from Northern Cape to export markets via the Port of Ngqura in Port Elizabeth.
I hope that Transnet’s newly appointed chief executive, Portia Derby, will have the courage to tackle the staggering graft that occurred during the construction of the pipeline from Durban to Johannesburg and the leasing of train loading bays. Derby, let’s talk about all these over coffee sometime. Without exception, there is a feeding frenzy in all state-owned companies, all national and provincial government departments and municipalities.
All state-owned companies are captured by different factions of the ANC.
All of them: including Prasa, water boards, SABC, Transnet, Eskom, Post Office, Coega Development Corporation, Ithala Bank and the Independent Development Trust (IDT).
Politicians in KwaZulu-Natal reportedly use Ithala Bank as their own piggy bank.
Sadly, all these companies have the potential to flourish and contribute taxes to the fiscus and create much needed jobs.
Every year South Africa spends a significant number of billions to bail out state-owned companies that ANC comrades are having a field day with, arrogantly plundering without any consequence.
All small towns, from Butterworth to Mthatha, Lusikisiki, Mafikeng, Vrede and Mangaung are collapsing.
They are all characterised by crumbling infrastructure, potholes, raw sewer spilling into the streets and erratic water supply, if any at all.
Mthatha is a pothole-riddled jumble that could take up to an hour to drive through via the N2 on a bad day.
A few years ago Mafikeng was the pride of the North West – clean, smart and well maintained.
Now it is a stinky and decaying backwater.
The ANC is responsible for all these.
Butterworth has not had water in more than five years. In many towns water is carted in through tankers, which are quite often owned by ANC comrades and warlords.
There are theories that in some cases water supply is deliberately tampered with so that it is carted through trucks in order to benefit ANC politicians.
Many municipalities use their capital and infrastructure budgets and grants on salaries.
Whether it is Ramaphosa or whoever at the helm, the ANC is too dirty to extricate itself from corruption. The ANC has run its course.
The party has hit a dead end. It doesn’t have any new ideas.
The ANC has nothing of value to add to this country. The ANC is going down and South Africa should extricate itself from the ANC.
South Africans should refuse to go down with the ANC.
The ANC should go down alone.
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