GARETH VAN ONSELEN: The ANC: the world’s worst opposition party
The ANC, writes Gareth van Onselen, can no more influence political debate than a gagged mime can deliver a political lecture
There is no shortage of double standards in SA today. The place fairly pulses with contradiction and hypocrisy. But of it all, one of the most profound inconsistencies is how the ANC is treated in opposition compared with the DA. In the Western Cape and Cape Town, where the ANC has now been in opposition for just less than and just more than a decade, respectively, it has put on a display so inept, so totally and utterly devoid of strategic coherence, purpose and conviction that one would not be amiss in describing the party as the most useless opposition in the world.Truly, it has been a breathtaking display of incompetence, one that has not only seen its share of the vote collapse (from 38% in Cape Town, in 2006, to 24% in 2016) on the back of a visionless vacuum but, as if to exacerbate its own ineptitude, the almost complete implosion of the organisation itself — to the extent that, as recently as July 2017, the ANC provincial executive committee disbanded the leadership of the ...
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