[Opinion] COVID19 IS ONE MAN’S POISON AND ANOTHER MAN’S TREAT

South Africa must be the only country in the world where a substantial proportion of the ruling class welcomes the international spread of the Coronavirus. I have no direct evidence that this is the case but circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that it must be the case. Before the outbreak of Covid19, the ANC was under siege. Evidence that had emerged proved that the ANC had been responsible for state capture which had cost SA many hundreds of billions of rands.

Many books had been published in quick succession detailing massive corruption involving and implicating many top members of the ANC. On assuming office as President of SA Ramaphosa had promised South Africans heaven and earth about uprooting corruption but after two years in office not a single looter looked as if he was about to be prosecuted. However, the looters must have felt vulnerable even though Ramaphosa and his half-hearted reformists looked weak and helpless.

All the state corporations were bankrupt and in deep debt and Moody’s was the last of the three international rating agencies which were about to downgrade SA to junk status. The economy was shrinking having been extinguished largely by the rapidly rising cost of increasingly unreliable Eskom power. It looked as if revenue collection was going to drop catastrophically at the time when the government needed it the most.

We were destined to lose our sovereignty to the International Monetary Fund [IMF] from whom we were destined to borrow large amounts worsening our already dire debt situation. It looked as if the ANC could not possibly spin doctor it’s way out of having to accept responsibility for the mess. Then the Covid19 crisis came to the world and it must have looked like manna to the besieged ANC. The Covid19 crisis could not have arrived at a more opportune time for the ANC.

Suddenly the international economy was plunged into crisis and SA was in a position to pose as just another one of the many economic victims of Covid19 which include countries with exemplary governance. The president of the ANC became the commander in chief in a war against a virus and, in that capacity, he was able to unify South Africans against an external enemy. The easily manipulable South Africans eagerly swallowed the bait and immediately forgot the very recent criminal record of the ANC.

People who had been activists against the looting of the ANC suddenly wanted all the stated intentions of the ANC to be believed as if we were now dealing with a born again ANC. To them, unity against the ‘enemy’ meant forgetting that the ANC can’t ever be trusted with money. Patriotism meant shelving demands for accountability. Pointing out that the Covid19 emergency provided looting opportunities seemed downright churlish to these new patriots. They considered it rude to mention the pending prosecutions of state capture looters.

Covid19 rehabilitated state capture looters in the eyes of some. These developments cannot have escaped the notice of the evil looters. One can only hope that the looters are not going to be carried away by their well known overdeveloped sense of entitlement. If the ANC scum gets it into their thick skulls that they are entitled to rehabilitation by virtue of Covid19 justice-loving people should brace themselves for a lot of noise and infrastructure torching from the ANC voting sheep

South African Views