The ANC emperor is naked: No weaving or spinning can hide the truth any more

In the fictitious world of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, it took a young, innocent child to blurt out what had been there all along for everyone to see – that the emperor was prancing around in public naked.

Everyone else around the vain fashionista monarch feared speaking up lest they were maligned as stupid and unfit for their positions.

This 19th-century tale came to mind as I followed the ANC’s National General Council this week with everyone talking about the NDR, self-correction, renewal and so on – all except the elephant in the room.

No one mustered enough courage, or had the innocence and straight-talk of a child, to spell out the truth facing this once-glorious organisation and – unfortunately, the entire South Africa. This truth is that the general voting-age public has woken up to the harsh reality that the ANC’s emperor is walking around without any clothes.

President Cyril Ramaphosa marched in about seven years ago dressed as Mr Renewal. Big business applauded and welcomed this new broom who deposed his predecessor promising to clean up the corruption swamps in the party and the state, and fix the economy.

As I did my own reflection – both of the ANC and the old Andersen tale – I remembered another important fact. The weavers who “made” the emperor’s special, non-existent clothes had their own illicit agenda. They had no intention of actually producing any great, exquisite outfit fit for a king. They had a fraudulent agenda to deceive and rip off the ruler. Which makes one wonder – considering the mess of unemployment, inequality, poverty, crime and corruption South Africa is in – whether the current weavers in the ANC ever intended bringing about a better life for all.

This week the weaving continued, and the one weave that took the cake for me was the party’s spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu trying to explain the financial “mess” the organisation is in – the mess that inspired the workers’ toyi toyi at the start of the NGC.

“I say if the ANC was a corrupt party — not individuals; the ANC as an organisation — if it was a corrupt party, we would not be poor. We’d be tapping into the resources of the state as a governing party.”

Thankfully, most people can now see through all the weaving and fake, non-existent clothing.