OUT TO LUNCH
You really have to hand it to the ANC when it comes to coming up with pure comedy gold. Clearly they are rather spooked ahead of the elections at the end of the month and understandably worried about the polls that give them support as low as 40%. But polls aren’t always spot on and maybe the consolation for the ANC is that there is still a 40% chance that useful idiots who clearly haven’t been paying much attention to what has been happening these past thirty years will still vote ANC.
Last week Thabo Mbeki (who was not the best loved of our presidents admittedly) came out to bat for the ANC with the astonishing statement that the ANC, rather like Old Mother Hubbard, found the cupboard bare when they came to power in 1994. Just a tiny office with a few broken chairs. The pencils had all been swiped and nobody could find the key to the men’s toilet. Even the coffee machine had been sabotaged by the outgoing, right wing regime. OK…I made the last lot up but it may as well have been included to fit the gloomy picture that poor Thabo drew of the state of affairs just after the turn of democracy. To quote the great man: ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
“When the ANC government took over in 1994, it found nothing in office. The National Party had shredded everything. When I came in as Deputy President of South Africa in 1994, I found an empty office with small old chairs and desks. Not a single paper in the office. No documents being handed over. Nothing. It meant that there was no president. We (ANC) built this country from scratch. We set up all these institutions you see in the country. We set precedent as we built. This story is not being properly told. The only story told is that the ANC failed since 1994.”
My esteemed fellow contributor Dave Steward dealt elegantly with this steaming pile of horse manure on May 3rd but it’s worth examining and mocking the ludicrous claim that the ANC built this country from scratch, particularly in the light of Pres Frogboiler’s desperate claim at Athlone Stadium on Worker’s (sic) Day that all the problems of South Africa today are the fault of apartheid.
That doesn’t quite fit in with Cde Thabo’s claim though that everything wonderful that has happened in the past thirty years is due to all the institutions the ANC claim to have set up in the country. Obviously Cde Thabo is fairly chuffed at the vast strides South Africa has made on the global stage since 1994 while Cde Frogboiler seems to be saying the exact opposite blaming high unemployment and the parlous state of the economy on a system of government that became extinct more than thirty years ago. A further example (as if one were needed) of the lack of logic within the ANC.