By Neil de Beer
One has to truly forgive a nation and its factual shock on the dawning of the harsh reality, that a huge dream of a rainbow nation, has now become a nightmare.
For many South Africans, the change of regime was a hard wake up call and since the 1991 referendum, where a majority of white citizens could only vote, decided to move on, we actually became optimistic with our future prospects of the Madiba era.
Twenty-eight years later, this Madiba era is very faded into the abyss and we find a ANC so dysfunctional and ransacked that in my opinion Madiba would barely recognise his own organisation any more.
The fact is very much a sad but cold truth. The ANC hugely failed to make the transition between a liberation movement to an effective government! This ANC had to do so many things that had to rectify the past divisions, but more than that, they had to face a new and massive task. That task was to lay down the AK 47 and petrol bomb, in exchange for leading a democratic and capitalist nation.
If there is one huge reality to this challenge, it was not just to show the world that communism and direct socialism would not be the order of the new government, but that the trend of democracy and capitalism would remain intact.
This, thought turned out to be more difficult than this ANC would find. With a factual partnership, still in place today, with the ANC, COSATU and SACP alliance, no matter the efforts to change their mindset, the attitude remained a huge mindset barrier, to cross.
You cannot in anyway come from a doctrine where all in the Struggle had to accept communism and nationalistic ideologies from members like Cuba, Russia and China that supported the ANC as brothers. The trade off for military and political support, was the fact that in many instances, the current ANC is still allowing the DNA of the past, damaging the present and indeed its future.
Until this ANC, totally mutates and changes, its inner style of operation and ideology, it will be the same effect that oil and water can be put in one barrel, but they will and cannot mix !
Neil de Beer is the chairman of the Investment Fund Africa Group and is a African economic commentator internationally
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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