GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Our democracy is a criminal negotiation
If the democratic alternative to the ANC’s failures cannot even be conceived of, then democracy itself is redundant
21 July 2021 - 05:10
Rarely has SA turned on the ANC government in the manner it has over the past week. On one level, the problem is simple enough: the state failed, as failing states do, to prevent, predict or suitably arrest a large section of the population, who went feral and looted a province to the ground.
Likewise, the solution would seem simple enough: vote for another party. But not in SA. Here we can make every logical step, bar the ultimate one — the one democracy offers up as the obvious answer to predicaments such as this. And so we sit still with the problem...
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