“Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.” – Joel Netshitenzhe Umrabulo, June/August 1996

“The country has had four different finance ministers in a topsy-turvy two-year period that battered the rand and wrought political havoc; close Zuma ally Tom Moyane’s crony curatorship of our taxes resulted in a R50-billion shortfall in collections in the last financial year, with the result that VAT was raised for the first time in two decades; state-owned entities, from the post office to SAA, were debt-ridden and barely functional; basic education was failing; health services were collapsing; and the Guptas had stolen everything.” Andrew Donaldson Politicsweb 7/9/2018

The ANC’s glorious National Democratic Revolution cadre deployment policy has produced a disturbing collection of venal but indolent and incompetent drones. This has become known as Mulholland’s Law or the ANC’s ‘Reverse Midas Touch’ and the fact that the policy is illegal is a given – that’s how the permanently insolvent ANC rolls.

They couldn’t pour water out of a boot, couldn’t organise a bacchanalian revel in a brewery or, as Gareth van Onselen once defined it, ‘couldn’t run downhill with a gale behind them’.

What they are really good at, however, is eating fried chicken. And, of course, shopping at McDonalds, with your money and mine while, in their sense of entitlement, exceeding the speed limit in their blue light convoys to the detriment of the country’s citizens.

The ANC’s Caviar Communists and Cointreau Comrades, while decrying colonialism, insist on buying cars which reflect a colonial heritage – such BMWs and Mercs – as befitting their exalted status. They deem this as essential even if their party has looted their province, municipality or department into bankruptcy and even if millions of South Africans go to bed hungry at night.

See here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here – to mention just a few examples. Complaints by opposition parties are treated, as always, ‘with the contempt they deserve’. It is, after all, only taxpayers’ money.

Our despair was aptly summed up in a recent Sunday Times column by Peter Bruce:

Workshop this: the ANC simply isn’t up to the job Nothing the ANC touches works properly; not the hospitals, not the schools,not the trains. Not the fire hoses. No water pressure, you see. Left to the ANC alone, there is no prospect of any of this getting better. The party simply doesn’t have the will to manage our vast social and mechanical complexity on the ground. Islands of excellence like the National Treasury and the Reserve Bank are under constant threat from the party itself. We can no longer refit the frigates the navy bought in the late 1990s. There’s no money to buy spare parts. The ships will slowly rot.

Peter Bruce did not mention our grounded Gripens.

The ANC definitely excels, however, at snouting – ask Jacob Zuma, he’ll tell you.

If you deny that, pluck up your courage and peer into that suppurating abscess known as ‘The Trough’, a state of ANC grace defended and supported in parliament in one no confidence debate after another.

There is not even a patina of gravy left in The Trough. The cupboard in Africa’s newest and most glitzy kleptocracy is bare and, as we borrow more money from Chinese banks which we will never be able to repay, we hurtle towards the confident prediction of R W Johnson in his latest book – an IMF bailout.

Does the City Press investigation into the installation of security systems by Bosasa at the homes of top ANC office bearers not indicate that almost everybody in the ANC is on the take? Given that, how can the ANC argue against the premise that it is innately corrupt?

In the space of a year we have gone from How to Steal a City to How to Steal a Country

Our ‘Hole-in-the Head’ foreign policy approach led Michael Gerson of the Washington Post to describe South Africa as a ‘Despot’s Democracy’ in 2008 and the ANC proved that by lying to our courts to enable the escape of Omar al-Bashir while repeatedly denying the Dalai Lama a visa so as to placate its Chinese paymasters. In a recent Daily Maverick article Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst have analysed just how damaging that is to our interests.

The recently-released crime statistics show that after two decades of ANC governance, the Beloved Country is an extraordinarily dangerous place for its citizens to live and the daily torching of trains and stations with no arrests speaks to the efficiency of our ANC-controlled police force.

Spare a thought for Cyril Ramaphosa, our knight errant and his Sisyphean anti-corruption task as, with a toothbrush between his teeth, an eyebrow brush in his left hand and a moustache comb in in his right, he tilts at Loot-freely House, his mangy, flea-ridden donkey showing its ribs while facing countless insurmountable obstacles as it stumbles valiantly forward on its three legs with Ace Magashula clinging desperately to one of them.

As the Glorious National Demographic Revolution devours its own, it is impossible to keep pace with the never-ending deluge of headlines that are testimony to what I call the ANC’s Tsunami of Sleaze which, as the e-coli count and thousands of dead fish in the Vaal River testify, has morphed into an river of excreta and raw sewage in our streets and our homes becomes ever more commonplace.

The built-in advantage of the ANC’s snouting system is that citizens cannot assimilate and retain any memory of the inexorable corruption headlines – who, for example, remembers that the floodgates of fraud were opened back in 1995 when Nelson Mandela took no action against Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma over the Sarafina 2 scandal and the deployed cadres realised that if she could get away with it, so could they?

If you want an example of this ineluctable tidal wave of malfeasance – just look at the list of headlines below for 9 September this year.

When such matters and the question of South Africa’s bestial farm murders are raised, as they were in the nation-wide marches last year, the ANC has a ready response – playing the race card.

In mid-August, I started to construct a timeline of news headlines which testify to the destructive impact of the ANC’s cadre deployment policy in which ethnicity, ideology and party loyalty count for much, much more in its eyes than expertise, institutional knowledge and mentoring ability. Not to mention merit and talent and commitment and years of service which, according to the ANC, count for nothing as our brightest and best citizens flee a country which, because of the ANC, is in ineluctable decline.

I had done this previously to illustrate the systemic uselessness of the ANC’s ‘spokesperson’ army who earn huge salaries but switch off their cellphones the moment yet more corruption and bungling and idleness is revealed in the government-controlled organisations that employ them.

I decided to build a timeline of hyperlinked headlines for a month – from 12 August to 12 September – to make the point that, despite the ANC’s so-called Damascene conversion when it finally ousted the Zupta regime and elected Cyril Ramaphosa as president, delinquency and ineptitude and sloth – combined with an utter indifference to the concepts of service delivery and preventative maintenance – are the defining characteristics of an incomprehensibly useless and criminal organisation masquerading as a political party.

The Democratic Alliance has, and understandably so, launched a petition calling for Cyril Ramaphosa to testify before the Zondo Commission into state capture. For Ramaphosa to suggest that he was unaware of pervasive Gupta corruption is manifestly absurd and he needs to explain to the country why he and the ANC did everything in its power for more than a decade to not only ignore Jacob Zuma ’s corruption but to promote and perpetuate it. Or, as he wrote on Twitter after the release of the Public Protector’s report on Nkandla:

“We are saying that the integrity of the president remains intact and that this president has the ability and know-how to lead our government and South Africa going forward.”

12/8/2018 – Exposed: state attorneys’ R80-billion scam

14/8/2018 – SABC has no money to pay legal fees

15/8/2018 – Looting syndicate ‘running amok’ at SAA Technical

15/8/2018 – Emfuleni loses all vehicles – OUTA

15/8/2018 – Hawks investigate cases related to Gupta-loot worth more than R40 billion

16/8/2018 – The Trojan Horse that wheeled R600m out of state-owned entities

16/8/2018 – Officials suspended with full pay cost the state millions – FF Plus

17/8/2018 – State officials fingered in a VBS-linked dodgy deposit

17/8/2018 – Gupta dairy farm saga: Estina 8 back in Bloemfontein court

17/8/2018 – ‘Full of rubbish and filthy’ – Former home of Mandela’s first wife left to ruin

19/8/2018 – Water fight over R322 million overspend

19/8/2018 – Who will protect you when the ANC comes for the land?

19/8/2018 – Skeletons tumble from Supra Mahumapelo’s closet

19/8/2018 – Supra Mahumapelo’s costly stunts made things worse

20/8/2018 – How the Guptas were let loose on Eskom

20/8/2018 – Late payment by govt to SMEs kill small service providers

20/8/2018 – Transnet posts huge jump in irregular expenditure to R8.1bn

20/8/2018 – Nationwide computer glitch delays SASSA card swapping

21/8/2018 – Overvaal: Panyasa Lesufi at the Concourt

21/8/2018 – Why are we spending R500 000 on braai areas for ministers?

22/8/2018 – Surprise! Zumaville is a no-show, but we still paid for it

22/8/2018 – Premier and failed ANC have collapsed service delivery

22/8/2018 – SARS was broken while fixing a problem that never existed

22/8/2018 – Skills shortage at SARS after wave of resignations

23/8/2018 – Forensic reports paint grim picture of ‘wanton looting’

23/8/2018 – Senekal stinks of ANC failed governance

24/8/2018 – Neal Froneman: SA is near the point of no return

24/8/2018 – Hawks tried to squash my case against Guptas, says Jonas

24/8/2018 – Hawks hold off on arrest of John Block

25/8/2018 – Government, PAC blame each other for #SobukweFuneral chaos

26/8/2018 – Gupta cases in crisis

26/8/2018 – Shocking revelations at Zondo inquiry must lead to prosecutions

28/8/2018 – 62% of SA births in 2017 had ‘no info on fathers’

30/8/2018 – Distressed SOE’s plead for more bailouts

30/8/2018 – Billions blown but Ekurhuleni buses remain bogged down

30/8/2018 – Consolidated outstanding debt of SOEs at R699.4bn

30/8/2018 – SA’s budget gap in July is biggest in at least 14 years

2/9/2018 – Bosasa scandal 2: Top ANC MP Vincent Smith got cash, CCTV

2/9/2018 – CIA alerted SA about Guptas in 2009

2/9/2018 – Mandela funeral scandal: Accused elected ANC leader in EC

3/9/2018 – Muthambi wanted to steal at all cost – Williams

4/9/2018 – SA in technical recession as second quarter GDP falls

6/9/2018 – Eskom’s irregular spend tops R19.6bn

7/9/2018 – DA slams mayor’s millions

7/9/2018 – Duarte link surfaces in Zondo inquiry

7/9/2018 – From BRICS to BRATS

7/9/2018 – Zuma’s legal fees now stand at R16.8m

9/9/2018 – NPA is ‘sitting’ on 686 mostly corruption cases, says SIU head Andy Mothibi

9/9/2018 – Mantashe, Mokonyane scored big in Bosasa bonanza

9/9/2018 – Gauteng hospital under scrutiny as ‘more babies die from infection’

9/9/2018 – Why do we have the SIU?

9/9/2018 – Safa on the brink of collapse

9/9/2018 – Our doctors walk away

9/9/2018 – EWC could lead to ‘classic banking crisis’ – Nedbank

9/9/2018 – Five babies have died from Klebsiella at hospital

9/9/2018 – Horrific attack on Metrorail commuters – Cape Town

10/9/2018 – Free State government the biggest spender on Gupta media companies

10/9/2018 – Journalist received death threats after Zuma secret meeting report

10/9/2018 – Musician Simon Milliken’s murder – death by delay

10/9/2018 – Guptas siphoned R100-million plus from China loan

10/9/2018 – Failing ANC backtracks on e-tolls

10/9/2018 – Madibeng mayor pleads ignorance of R30m VBS investment

11/9/2018 – R2000 tank of petrol may not be far away

11/9/2018 – Land prices plummet as EWC firms up

11/9/2018 – SA has ‘deficit’ of 62 000 police officers

11/9/2018 – Sixth baby dies in Klebsiella outbreak

11/9/2018 – Former ANC employee Velile Present drove hijacked getaway vehicle

12/9/2018 – 56 murders per day in SA: Six times higher than that of the US

12/9/2018 – Crime Stats: South Africa is at war with itself

12/9/2018 – Crooked officials capture provincial agriculture dept

12/9/2018 – Tony Ehrenreich censured for threats against Jewish community

12/9/2018 – Revealed! How corrupt officials steal farms at taxpayers’ expense

An apt description of 23 years of ANC tenderpreneurial rent seeking and bottom feeding would be:

They came, they ate, they left … … with a Golden Handshake