How corrupt is the ANC?

Professor Micheal Savage,a sociologist at the University of York in England,wrote:

"Theft,fraud and violence,South African MP's do it all.A culture of impunity has made the South African parliament one of the most scandal-ridden govrnments in the world whereby MP's are arrested for drunken driving,shoplifting,fraud and varied corruption offences.

Of the 535 MPs, 29 have been found guilty of domestic violence, 7 have been arrested for fraud, 19 have been accussed of bouncing fraudulent cheques,117 have been involved in at least two businesses that have gone bankrupt,71 cannot obtain a credit card because of their bad credit ratings,14 have been arrested on drug-related charges,8 have been arrested for shoplifting,84 have been arrested for drunken driving.

Tony Yengeni,the former chief whip of the ANC,who was convicted for fraud in 2003 while chairing the country's defence commitee said this of their ANC elite of which he's part of:"What does the high court got to do with my life?I don't have to ask permission from them to do certain things...

When asked about his numurous luxury cars which includes a MASERATI and two BMW's he replied "many other people have cars including white people who still have all the wealth of this country".

For those brought up in the townships politics becomes the doorway to self-enrichment.Survivalism in SA is seen as political entitlement.Few MP's ever goes to prison.

2.The Washington Post newspaper wrote this:

South Africa loses billions of dollars due to negligence and corruption by the ANC Government.

"A South African government minister reportedly spends the equivalent of nearly $70,000(US) of taxpayer money on a trip to Switzerland to visit his girlfriend in jail who is facing drug charges,then tells his president that he was on official business.He claims to have been on sick leave since February.Another minister and the police chief were implicated in an unlawful deal to lease police buildings at inflated prices,which then cost taxpayers more than $250 million(US).

These incidents pale beside the sprawling,routine corruption and negligence in South African governance exposed by Willie Hofmeyr,the head of the anti-corruption agency known as the Special Investigating Unit.Hofmeyr told Parliament that around 20% of all government procurements or more than $3.8 billion,go missing each year-most of which gets stolen and the rest untraceable because of negligence.

The South African government barely blinked when that report was made.

Hofmeyr is currently investigating more than 900 cases of questionable contracts and conflicts of interest,valued at more than $635 million.The worst theft,he said,takes place at the local government level,where there wasn't that much oversight.

Recommendations were made to Zuma to act against corrupt ministers.And what is Zuma's response to all that?A presidential spokesman said at the time "that Zuma would respond to the recommendations when he is ready".

3.From the New York Times newspaper tells us this:

South Africa Slips From the Moral High Ground says ALAN COWELL.

"South Africa has never liked to see itself in any way as run-of-the-mill country,instead preferred to cast itself as aloof from the corruption,strife and misrule so often associated with the continent to its north.

Hence Thabo Mbeki's calling the country's first democratic election in 1994 as "an African Renaissance".

However South Africa have become a different country under its newest coterie of the most powerful that surrounds President Jacob Zuma and has since lost its claim to the moral high ground.

Archbishop Desmond M.Tutu, said recently of the ANC "Mr.Zuma,you and your government don’t represent me...You represent your own interests."

The archbishop’s remarks provoked some sharp reactions from the ANC.

“In the GREATER scheme of things,who is Bishop Tutu?A prelate who was won honors because he raised his voice against apartheid? Who did not?” said ANC veteran Thula Bopela.

Corruption and patronage have replaced principle and promised transparency in South Africa.

Author Njabulo S. Ndebele wrote "South Africa have become corrupted by the attractions of instant wealth, reflecting a potentially catastrophic collapse in the once cohesive understanding of the post-apartheid project as embodied in our constitution.The ANC functions as a state within the state,and it thinks it is the state."

Dr.R.Simangaliso Kumalo,the head of the School of Religion and Theology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal,wrote:"Pretoria seemed to side with dictators like President Robert G.Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Col.Muammar Qaddafi in Libya blending its debts to those who supported it in the liberation struggle with a hard-nosed pragmatism.

Political analyst Eusebius McKaiser said in a lecture in August,discussing South Africa’s role in the Libya conflict:

"It is clear to me that we do not have a moral foreign policy.There is little indication that our foreign policy is consistently and genuinely informed by a thorough commitment to project our domestic constitutional principles onto the international arena.”

Indeed, those principles —or the threats to them — lie at the center of the debate.Two years after their first free election in 1994,South Africa created a new constitution guaranteeing rights that much of Africa had shunned,ignored or undermined and seeming to lock the land onto the moral coordinates of its struggle for democracy.

But the ground has shifted.Max du Preez,a journalist and author wrote:"Nothing anybody says or does can be taken at face value any longer, because we suspect this can only be explained if one understands what the doer or speaker wants to achieve in terms of his or her factional interest.”

So from a government minister,a front-page sex scandal and claims of a honey trap set by "spooks" determined to crush enemies of the president!

What an interesting government South Africa has in power!Turbulent some might argue,but so very much corrupt aswell.

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