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The phrase “For whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” originates from a poem by English poet John Donne, written in 1624. The phrase was later used as the title of a novel by American author Ernest Hemingway in 1940. The phrase is often used to convey that a threat or warning applies to everyone, not just a specific person or group.

In a half-empty stadium on January 8 this year, the bell clearly tolled for a visibly tired state president Cyril Ramaphosa, delivering yet another desultory speech to increasingly disillusioned followers about the achievements of his party the African National Congress (ANC). He spent much time extolling the virtues of the heroes of the revolution, stating that the past five years have been a time of “recovery, rebuilding and renewal”. (Of what we may ask? In 1994 his party was handed a functioning first world country on a plate. Thirty years of ANC “government” has seen destruction, dissipation and disillusionment. Railways have disappeared, roads are death traps as are our hospitals, there has been no water or electricity in many areas for months, education has collapsed, corruption is endemic. So what was rebuilt and renewed over the past five years?)

The president declares that his party “has had to revitalise the economy after more than a decade of poor performance.”  How was our economy revitalised after a decade of Ramaphosa’s poor performance?  How did he do it? What did he do? The president also declares in his speech that his party has had to “rebuild our public institutions after an era of state capture”. What public institutions have been revitalised under his watch? It was under his watch that state capture proliferated. He was deputy president from May 25, 2014, and became president on February 25, 2018. Jacob Zuma was president from May 2009 to February 2018, South Africa’s “nine lost years” to which people refer.

During those years, the parliamentary opposition made three attempts to remove Zuma via votes of no confidence, and each time Ramaphosa said nothing. He voted with the ANC to protect Jacob Zuma’s crimes, especially the state capture which at the time was in full swing. Now the president is lamenting those times as if they had nothing to do with him!! Now we must rebuild because of a tragedy that was happening for four years under his watch!

What chicanery!

HISTORY

He talks of history in the first part of his speech. He says “We are not passive observers of our history. We are its authors. We are the builders of this country we call home”. Really? What did the ANC build?
Let’s look at history, written history. Briton Dr. Andrew Smith, trained as a doctor and an experienced army reconnaissance operative for the British army, was sent to South Africa in 1832  by his government to investigate and report on the peoples, the plants, the animals and the interior of the land South Africa.  Britain’s general ignorance of southern Africa was embarrassing not only to the British government but even to their representatives in Cape Town, who knew little of South Africa’s hinterland. Smith set up an expedition into  Africa to explore the virtually unknown interior of the country. He and his entourage left Graaff Reinet in August 1834 and returned to Cape Town early 1836.  They went as far as beyond the Orange river and travelled deep into Zululand.

Smith’s journal was ”one of the most significant accounts of African exploration to have been written in the nineteenth century” according to the publishers, the South African Museum, (Cape Town 1975) who collated the content from the original 1830’s notes and journals of Smith and his entourage, as presented to the British government.

The title of the book is “Andrew Smith’s Journal of his expedition into the interior of South Africa 1834 - 1836. An authentic narrative of travels and discoveries of the manner and customs of the Native tribes and the physical nature of the country.”   The book was edited by Professor William F. Lye of the Department of History and Geography at Utah State University, USA. Included in the expedition was Charles Davidson Bell, a senior surveyor and artist in the staff of the Surveyor General’s Department, Cape Town.  He made hundreds of drawings while travelling with Smith.

READ THE BOOK

It would do the president well to read what Dr. Smith saw and what was illustrated. The local black population and the San people were revealed as living at little more than a stone age level of development. Even though whites had been in South Africa since1652, there was little evidence that the basic trappings of European civilization  – roads, schools, methods of travel and trading practices - had rubbed off on to the locals. This is mentioned to repudiate the continual repetition by the ANC as to why black people in South Africa have been serial under-achievers: apartheid, repression, colonialism, racism, lack of opportunities and the plethora of excuses are the usual suspects. These are used to justify Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). In reality, the DNA was never there to achieve, to move forward with new discoveries, to maintain what had already been achieved and to seek new frontiers of knowledge. History reveals this.

Illustrations in Smith’s book show the activities of the local tribes consisted of hunting of wild animals, women grinding grains, men in war dress, and war dances around a fire. Cattle were in evidence and seeds were planted. Houses were made of grass and soil (mud). There was regular fighting between tribes. This was the DNA background which the ANC government of South Africa had to transcend, which they have done to a certain degree. But as for the ANC “building South Africa” as the president declares, this is another whopper. (When they formed their party in 1912, the meeting was held in Waite’s Mission Hall, near Bloemfontein. Had they not built a school, or a church of their own by 1912?  Even today, how many schools have the ANC built for their people? The National Party under Dr. Verwoerd built hundreds of schools for black South Africans!)

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

The preamble to the president’s speech is without substance. But it sets the tone for the rest of the January 8 address: promises made  to ”fix” numerous facets of the South African economy which were in working order when the ANC took over in 1994. The usual “equality and transformation” goals are mentioned, plus pages of promises to “renew” that which was in working order thirty years ago. Freedom, democracy and a “better life for all” have become obligatory ANC narratives and are promised as a matter of course.

The ANC has achieved little except to use taxpayers’ money to keep millions of the party’s followers above the bread line. What sticks in the craw about the party is the obfuscation, the lame excuses and the downright lies. Clearly the party has no respect for the sections of the populace that have some grey matter.  One of the government’s best examples of the many deceptions it perpetrates is education: the ludicrous pretences put out every year about the high matric “pass rates”.  The education subterfuge can be taken as a yardstick in respect of the way the ANC manipulates the message regarding the rest of the country’s activities. They really don’t care who believes them or not. They think they will be in power for a long time to come, and their behaviour reflects this mindset.

EDUCATION IS BUT ONE EXAMPLE.

Nowhere is the ANC’s dishonesty more palpable than in the chorus of self-congratulations  emanating from the Education departments each year as they laud the “successes” of 88 percent (or thereabouts) pass rate achieved by South Africa’s matric students.

Says Mmusi Maimane, member of Parliament and head of political party BOSA: ”Too often the Education department relies on headline pass rates while avoiding deeper questions about quality and outcomes. However, numbers cannot be spun. The reality is that only 30% of those who ‘pass’ matric will have achieved 50% or more in key gateway subjects such as mathematics, physical science, accounting, economic and business studies. The National Senior Certificate standard is the “lowest threshold at which a learner can be deemed to have passed. This allows learners to pass matric by achieving 30% in three subjects and 40% in another three, resulting in an average of a 35% pass.”  This is, says Maimane, “legally permissible but educationally indefensible. Allowing learners to pass subjects with marks as low 35% has far-reaching consequences.” (Sunday Times 11.1.26)

It is also fraud at its most flagrant. With an annual budget approaching R300 bn, and the responsibility for more than 24000 schools and more than13 million learners, the results achieved by the ANC government after thirty years in power reflects not only their abysmal performance in education but the fact that this duplicity is mirrored in virtually every other facet of South African life under their control. This makes the promises made by the president in his January 8 speech (and virtually every other speech he delivers} just a succession of words with no substance. Yet he is arrogant enough to trot out these vacuous phrases year after year.  His mediocrity is obvious to many, but unfortunately his words are swallowed hook, line and sinker by the hapless millions who still believe him.

The tragedy is that while the bell tolls for the president and the ANC, it also tolls for South Africa’s people. How to rid this country of the ANC cancer? That is the question to focus our collective minds!