“Our obligation is always to the future,” former president Kgalema Motlanthe told a special meeting of the ANC national executive committee (NEC) last weekend. He was quoting the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to describe the dangers of the ANC continuing on its current destructive path.

What Motlanthe did not say is that history takes prisoners. The ANC is a prisoner of its recent history, a prisoner of the perception — and often the reality — that its leaders are factional, selfish and corrupt miscreants; that they are distant and arrogant in the face of grinding poverty, unemployment, incompetence and mismanagement...

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