Dear Ronnie

Thanks for the letter suggesting I might like to spoil my ballot. Ironically enough, it comes not long after a friend who is in COPE told me he wouldn't be voting at all this time, and not long after I had decided I could not vote DA this time. How could I possibly vote for a party which praises Thabo Mbeki whose Aids denialism cost the lives of over 360,000 African women and children? I can't vote for that in just the same way that I couldn't vote for a party which praised Hitler. 

But I am surprised by your attitude, for you sound so indignant about the corruption of the ANC regime. Yet how could you possibly have expected anything else, Ronnie?

Let me go back to the early 1960s in Durban when we first met. We have been friends for over 50 years now. In those days we saw pretty much eye to eye and we both supported the ANC. Then you went underground and resurfaced in London at about the same time that I arrived there in 1964. My assumption then was that I would continue to support the ANC and I spent some time in ANC circles in London. It was a rude shock. The people I met were completely authoritarian - there wasn't a proper democrat among them. Many were openly racist. And already corruption was visible. The one thing that seemed obvious was that you couldn't trust people like that. They might get up to absolutely anything. So I recoiled and realised that I had been attracted by the romantic myth of the ANC. The reality was something else again.

After all, once I had seen what the ANC in exile was like I could see perfectly well what sort of government it would produce and I can truthfully say that nothing that has happened since 1994 has at all surprised me. I expected the ANC to be completely corrupt, to have very little respect for law or the constitution and only a very tenuous attachment to democracy. It was because this was so obvious to me that I recoiled from the ANC in exile and our paths, which had been roughly parallel until then, diverged. 

You see, Ronnie, when I saw you go soldiering on inside the ANC I assumed you must know all about the corruption and the lack of democracy - how could you not, you were in it much deeper than I had been and much more permanently ? So I assumed that while you must know all about that, that you had decided that nonetheless other things were more important. I respected the fact that you wanted to get rid of apartheid - so did I - but I found it impossible to believe that the ANC would build a better or more just society. It seemed to me that Franz Fanon had understood the nature of the African bourgeoisie better than anyone else and that, as in the rest of Africa, the ANC elite were bound to enrich themselves and ape the consumption, though not the productive habits of their white predecessors. The result would be a whole new layer on inequality super-imposed on the already very unequal structure of South African society. This was, indeed, exactly what Fanon would have predicted and it is exactly what has happened.

So while I'm glad you are against this corruption and inequality, I do find it very hard to believe that it is a surprise to you. Surely you knew that was exactly what you were working towards in all your years of the ANC? You must have had a class analysis of the situation in your mind, surely? And anyway, you were a junior minister to Joe Modise, the most corrupt thug of the lot. You must have been aware that he was behind the huge corruption of the arms deal, just like you must have known that he had tried to kill Chris Hani, that he had run the stolen cars racket in Zambia and, quite certainly, that he was on BOSS's payroll. I simply cannot believe that anyone could be so stupid or naive as not to know those things, Ronnie. If you didn't know those things it has to be because you didn't want to know them.

It's a bit the same, isn't it, with the ANC and SACP in exile in Moscow or East Germany or Bulgaria or wherever in the Soviet bloc. How does one account for the fact that so many ANC/SACP cadres spent all that time in those countries without ever realising that the people of those countries we dying to get rid of Communism and would do so like a shot once they got a chance ? How could people who prided themselves on being revolutionaries be unaware that the vast mass of the countries in which they were living were in a state of revolutionary ferment against their regimes ? If they didn't know, Ronnie, it has to be because they didn't want to know. The defence that they were all too stupid or too naive to know simply won't wash. One simply can't accept stupidity on such a scale as a reasonable excuse.

But then I also have to ask, what about all the years that you were a minister under Mbeki ? You knew he had played a cardinal role in the arms deal and was trying to hush it all up. You saw how Feinstein and Woods were treated when they asked awkward questions. Why did you not speak up about that ? Even now the arms deal is still by far the biggest piece of corruption - far, far bigger than Nkandla - that the new South Africa has seen, so if you don't like corruption, then how do we understand your silence then ? Equally, Ronnie, why didn't you or any other minister in Mbeki's cabinet speak out about Mbeki's awful Slaughter of the Innocents, deliberately denying life-saving drugs to HIV+ young women ? That was surely the most wicked thing that anyone in South Africa has ever done. I can't think of anything done by Verwoerd, Vorster or Botha that begins to compare with that. It was worse than a thousand Nkandlas. 

I guess that what you would say is that this isn't what you were fighting for during your years in MK. But Ronnie, that would simply mean that you didn't understand the struggle you were in. As a Marxist surely it must have been crystal clear to you that everywhere in Africa African nationalism has placed a corrupt and parasitic bourgeoisie in power, that that is what African nationalism is all about ? Just because you personally might have had some different ideas in your head could not possibly alter the class nature of the movement in which you were involved. And indeed, you did know that if your side won, men like Joe Modise would come to power. So no surprises there. 

As I say, I did always expect that the ANC in power would mean exactly what we've now got, a corrupt government gradually bringing the country to its knees. What is odd to me is that all this indignation is focused against the Zuma regime. Of course Zuma's corrupt and of course the government just drifts but surely you would agree that Zuma is a whole lot better than Mbeki? Simply by making ARVs available Zuma has saved many hundreds of thousands of lives.

Also, he has no ambition to make everyone think the same way that he does - he has none of Mbeki's ambition to be a philosopher-king and we're so much freer and better off without that. He is a genial soul and has none of Mbeki's paranoia. He is also far more tolerant. Mbeki would never have anything to do with Tony Leon but Zuma is very warm and charming towards the Leader of the Opposition, which is what a President should be like in a proper democracy. Zuma is even very patient about being booed - can you imagine what a witch-hunt there would have been if Mbeki had been booed ?

As I say, Ronnie, I really am puzzled and would be most grateful if you could give me some answers.

Yours sincerely

Bill Johnson

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter