Mantashe must stop making spurious accusations of regime change
11 May 2016
While Shakespeare observed that “the lady doth protest too much” it is abundantly clear to all of us that Gwede Mantashe is doing the very same and therefore with the same outcome.
Since the beginning of this year ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, has continued to accuse western powers of working to destabilise former liberation movements in Southern Africa. Is so, who are their foot soldiers and why have they not been identified? Also, why does the intelligence agency not act to bring them to book? It is common cause that when a lie is spoken often enough, it becomes politics. That is what it has become: new ANC politics. Every movie has to have a villain and every failing government must indeed have counter revolutionaries to blame. That is the bizarre situation in which the failing ANC finds itself.
According to ENCA, Mantashe was once again regurgitating his nonsensical accusations against Western powers in Zimbabwe. He preposterously asserted that Southern African countries had become targets for regime change because they were viewed as being inconvenient to Western interests. In the case of South Africa, Mantashe argued, these nebulous forces were working for regime change under the guise of strengthening democratic institutions.
The ruling party should arrange a meeting with all those young people who were taken to the United States for six weeks and asked if they were being planted everywhere in the campuses and everywhere else to begin an insurrection. It is easy to identify them and to question them. Casting aspersions as wildly as Mantashe is doing is not befitting for a senior political leader.
Zuma, without any interference or malice from western powers caused the pension fund of government employees to lose R95-billion when he axed the high performing Nene and replaced him with Des van Rooyen. Other pension funds in the public sector lost R4-billion. All of this, according to Dan Matjila, CEO of the Public Investment Corporation, was because of Zuma’s action which we saw as his attempt to capture the National Treasury. Zuma, likewise, caused private investors massive losses also. He is running the country into the ground and South Africans are increasingly losing trust in the ruling party.
Mantashe is on more logical grounds when he concedes that Zuma and some other ANC leaders are scoring own goals. That is indeed a better diagnosis of the ills afflicting the ruling party. However, he is unwilling to see that a man with nearly 800 unanswered criminal charges hanging over his head and damned by the Constitutional Court for having broken his oath of office is totally unfit to lead the nation. South Africa is in the mess it is today because of the profligacy of Zuma and the rampant corruption in government that he is presiding over.
Mantashe’s accusations are bizarre, baseless and spurious. They must be rejected with the contempt they deserve. If he has proof, let him act on it. If he hasn't, he must not invent fictional politics and make that pass as real politics.
Issued by Dennis Bloem, COPE Spokesperson, 11 May 2016
