SA’s political cancer is almost impossible to heal
President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team face a Herculean task in their bid to restore ethical leadership
Bertolt Brecht’s warning in a satirical play from 1941 taking an allegorical swipe at Adolf Hitler and the Nazis resonates in modern SA, where former president Jacob Zuma and his coterie went rogue and pushed the state to the brink of an economic disaster. The problem is, as the German playwright and thinker points out, even with Zuma gone and an eminently sensible replacement found in the form of President Cyril Ramaphosa to lead the country and the ANC, the underlying conditions that gave rise to Zuma continue to resonate and fester. Zuma's career as president of country and party began unravelling in an unsettlingly close internal party battle at the ANC conference last December swung by David Mabuza, an allegedly corrupt politician from Mpumalanga who was rewarded with the position of deputy president. Brecht’s play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, contains a shrewd observation about the rise of Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) party that citizens of SA would do well t...
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