JUSTICE MALALA: The dearth of leadership across the globe makes for gloomy times
Extract
What a thoroughly depressing week. For those of you who are old enough to remember a time when being able to say “superior logic” didn’t mean you are political savvy, here’s a question: remember those days when we said we would never be as corrupt as the Sani Abachas of Nigeria, or the Mobutu Sese Sekos of Zaire?
The Bosasa and Gupta scandals confirm it: we are there. We are there.
What a depressing week for the world, for Africa, for SA. Zimbabwe is going to hell in a handbasket. Emmerson Mnangagwa, the dictator Robert Mugabe’s former chief henchman, is sending troops and secret police to arrest, detain, maim and murder his own people. Some of us are not at all surprised: he did it in the 1980s with the murder of thousands of people in Matabeleland. He repeated it in 2008 when he helped Mugabe steal an election. It’s happening again. Zimbabwe’s neighbours, particularly us South Africans, are quiet in the face of these atrocities. Our leadership is supposed to be an improvement on the past, yet SA is treating Mnangagwa exactly as it used to treat Mugabe: with sickening, immoral deference. An election has been rigged and stolen twice over in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Life goes on. When faced with a situation like this one, instead of speaking clearly and loudly for truth and justice, many of us (and our governments) opt to make a deal with the dev...
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