And so the mighty shall fall

Jacob Zuma has capitulated.  He has made an offer to settle the ongoing Nkandla debate by coming to an agreement to ‘pay back the money’. 

What Zuma seems to fail to appreciate is that any payment, no matter even if it is the whole amount swindled by him from the taxpayers, would not undo what he has done.  Jacob Zuma has long been suspected of taking money by illicit means from the citizens of South Africa.  Numerous Press reports, as well as other rumors and detailed accounts of his activities, almost always through front men, have circulated for years, many starting before his ascension to the Presidency.  Many of these acts are alleged to have taken place at an early stage in his career, and many of them have been the subjects of criminal charges brought against him, yet Zuma has managed to avoid the charges coming to trial, it has been alleged, by inducing the National Prosecuting Agency to withdraw the charges, making it possible for Zuma to continue on his path of destruction of the economy of the country and of the Constitutional Rights, which so many of the citizens held so dear at the time of Mandela.

By agreeing to ‘pay back the money’, Zuma, no doubt, hopes to avoid the potential huge damage that may accrue to him and his Party during the trial by the Constitutional Court in an action brought by the EFF and the DA.  He also hopes, no doubt, that this gesture will bring a reversal in the swelling tide of criticism against him and his Party for their continuing abuse of the Constitution and the Office of President, clearing the way for the Local Government elections to be held later this year.  One hopes that the ever-patient electorate that has returned the ANC to power in each election will, at last, realize that the collapse of the South African economy, which has brought destitution to a large number of citizens over the years that the ANC has been in control (if one may be pardoned for using ‘control’ as a description of the chaos wrought on a previously-strong economy by mismanagement, corruption – as a purposeful aim of those in power or as a bye-product and by the imposition of laws and regulations that cannot be read as anything other than a new Apartheid) must be laid squarely at the feet of the Association for Corruption and Nepotism.  Jacob Zuma is the figurehead of the Party, and a willing leader in the actions it and its top brass have taken, but the leaders of the Party must also accept responsibility for their role in what he has done, and permitted to be done.  Each one of them, the leaders, the Members of Parliament sitting there on an ANC ticket to represent the people is, in reality, doing no more than rubber-stamping the actions of Zuma and his Cabinet, and is complicit in the corruption, the mismanagement, the dishonesty that have become the hallmark of Government in South Africa. A brief overview of the highlights is as follows:

• The Minister of Justice is one of the obvious culprits, for his shameful whitewash of Jacob Zuma’s enrichment in the Nkandla scandal. 
• The Speakers of the House of Parliament, every one from the time that Thabo Mbeki steadfastly refused to allow Parliament to debate the Arms Deal to Baleta Mbete, who has stated, in contravention of the Constitution, that the State President is not subject to the same rules as any other person, who called the armed Police into the House to evict all members of the EFF for disrupting Zuma’s speech of denial (disregarding the Rules in that many of those MPs had done nothing wrong), again in breach of the Constitution, who permitted (or ordered) that freedom of speech and communication of persons within the House were denied by jamming of signals into and out of the House, an extreme breach of the Constitution, must all accept responsibility for the breakdown of the economy, of racial harmony and of democracy in South Africa. 
• The Minister of Public Enterprises must also stand in the dock, accused of the disastrous mismanagement of SAA, SABC, Transnet, Eskom and the numerous other State-owned enterprises that have been permitted to bleed the economy while they destroyed the infrastructure that had been built up over many years, in addition to applying racist procurement requirements that are clearly in breach of the Constitution. 
• The Minister of Basic Education must plead guilty to a charge of depriving millions of pupils of a decent education and destroying the industrial and business base of the economy, even though she has finally admitted that she is presiding over a system that is in a state of chaos, a fact which has been clearly documented in the media over many years. 
• The Minister of Higher Education must be arraigned for his catastrophic insistence on using the universities as an alternative to unemployment, bringing about a sharp decline in the international value of South African degrees, a virtual collapse of university finances and a collapse of the intellectual base of the country, while hiding away in Parliament to avoid facing the angry students. 
• The Minister of Public Works must plead guilty to the charge of failing in his duty to manage the Department that handed out the funds so freely for the construction of Nkandla. 
• The Minister of Finance must be charged with the unreasonable use of the draconian powers entrusted to SARS, used illicitly to enforce the closure or sales on favorable terms of several mines and other businesses, as well as consenting to the misappropriation of funds by top ANC members and guiding the economy firmly down the slippery slope to junk status. 
• The Minister of Minerals and Energy is certainly complicit in the transfer of huge assets at steep discounts to ‘the formerly disadvantaged’, a family that arrived in South Africa in 1994, is resident in Dubai, and can, by no stretch of the imagination, be described as ‘disadvantaged’, unless, of course, they believe that their support of the members of the ANC and their families can be described as a ‘disadvantage’. 
• The Minister of Justice must be held to account for the shameful mishandling of cases, such as the murder of Anni Dewani, for the chaos that prevails in the ‘justice’ system, for permitting Zuma to free on medical parole (against the testimony of doctors) his close associates, like Shabir Sheik to live a life of ease and leisure. 
• The Minister of Trade and Industry must pay for the huge costs brought on the country by the BEE policies that he so actively promoted in the interests of ensuring that the ANC elite and in the process of introducing a new Apartheid, while destroying whatever shreds of racial harmony his colleagues left behind. 
• The Ministers of Homeland Affairs over the years must explain why they worked so hard to destroy the tourism industry by bringing the country and its passports into such disrepute that it is now an ordeal for a South African to travel abroad, and then followed that up with the unreasoning imposition of insane visa regulations.

These people are only a microcosm of the rot that prevails throughout the Government, built up under the ‘expert’ management of the ANC.  An exhaustive analysis of the extent of that rot and of the people who are responsible for it and who must be brought to account in the interests of truth, justice and democracy would cover thousands of pages and will tie up the Courts for decades, but that analysis must be done, to ensure that the citizens of South Africa regain the freedoms, the rights and the democracy that Nelson Mandela promised, and to ensure that the conditions that the ANC has brought to the country can never, never, and never again, be repeated.