CARPING POINT: Stratcom was never a tenth as successful as destroying the ANC’s image as the ANC has been doing this all on its own, writes Kevin Ritchie.
ESKOM’S Megawatt Park got renamed this week, to MegaGravy Train Park. No sooner had that been discovered, then someone pulled a similar stunt on Luthuli House and renamed it Chief Albert LootFreely House.
As many rugby referees (and Rassie Erasmus) will tell you, it’s fairly easy to hack a Wikipedia entry, but Google Maps is next level. What should be even more concerning for the ANC – and everyone else concerned – is that despite the hack being reported in the mainstream media and giggled about on social media, both hacks remained in place well into Tuesday.
It’s a worry because if anyone could prevent it happening or wreak biblical fury at having the piss taken, it should be the various factions in the ANC which have successfully emasculated and weaponised organs of state to spy on one another.
You’re left with two options: incompetence or arrogance. Either party apparatchiks couldn’t get it fixed, or they couldn’t be bothered. With the ANC though, it’s often both. That’s what happens when you’ve been in power for 30 years without any real opposition.
It’s difficult to engage with the real world when you’re cossetted against the harsh realities of living cheek by jowl with the ordinary voters, as City Press reported on Sunday – R93million worth of upgrades to ministers’ homes.
This went way beyond installing a generator or a solar panel, this was to fumigate, revamp kitchens and even hang curtain rails. It’s “Let ’em eat cake”, Marie Antoinette 2023-style on steroids.
It’s all a joke, all of it. Thankfully, there isn’t a mob with pitchforks outside Megawatt Park (a viciously ironic misnomer if there ever was one), although rotten chickens and other meat from defrosted freezers have been dumped on their doorstep by desperate “consumers”.
As for the ANC, anyone protesting in downtown Joburg has to take their lives in their hands walking through the real-life District 9 that is the CBD these days – if they could even be bothered.
It should be galling though that Chief Albert Luthuli, one of the most internationally revered leaders of the movement, second perhaps only to Mandela himself, gets redubbed LootFreely. The leadership of the ANC are wont to blame apartheid’s dirty tricks unit Stratcom for anything that casts them in a bad light.
But Stratcom was never a tenth as successful as destroying the ANC’s image as the ANC has been doing this all on its own.
It’s a little like uMkhonto we Sizwe. It targeted infrastructure in our brutal civil war. It’s the bitterest irony that Eskom and the municipalities could survive that, but not the peace that followed. Instead, tenderpreneurs and cadre deployment have brought the grid close to meltdown and pump untreated s*** into drinking water. This week, 15 people died from cholera in Hammanskraal.
Who is the ANC fighting in 2023? Who’s the Struggle against when it’s been the government since 1994? Changing names? They can count themselves lucky we can still find it funny.
* Kevin Ritchie is a seasoned former newspaper editor and current media consultant. He writes the weekly Carping Point column.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the DFA.
