Racism, resentment, and the reinvention of right — the ANC’s slide into moral oblivion

The other day I watched the extraordinary spectacle of Judge Dennis Davis in his programme Judge for Yourself trying to get out of Tony Yengeni the hint of an admission that it was wrong for politicians to steal millions of rands from state coffers. 

The conversation went something like this:

Davis: The Zondo commission has exposed many politicians and other people in power to have misused their positions to steal millions of rands, do you not think this is wrong?

Yengeni: Yes, but while you have such inequality and people feel that not enough is being done to bridge the gap then people will continue to do this.

Davis: Yes, I get that, but it is not the poor people who are stealing the money, it is rich people. And they are basically stealing from the poor. Is this not wrong?

Yengeni: Yes this is true but while you have such inequality and people feel that not enough is being done they will continue to do this.

Davis: Yes I get all that, but how can you justify the fact that it is already rich people doing this and the poor are suffering as a result because these resources should go to them.

Yengeni: Yes this is true but while you have such inequality and people feel that not enough is being done about this they will continue to do this.

Davis, desperately trying to help Yengeni say something different, tried interrupting him at one point.  (He had, thankfully, another guest who was also a younger member of the ANC, though not a famous one like Yengeni, who was trying to say that corruption in the ANC was wrong). 

Yengeni, showing annoyance, bravely soldiered on: “It is undemocratic not to allow me to speak: This is true but while you have inequality and people think there is nothing being done about this etc etc.”

So one eventually gets the picture. Yengeni believes it is true that one should not steal from state coffers but this truth is apparently trumped by another truth, the fact of economic inequality. And this truth trumps every other truth. Therefore it was not wrong for him, for example, to accept the offer of a very smart car in exchange for his patronage as a powerful politician. He was simply helping the people bridge the unacceptable economic gap between black and white. 

The conversation would have taken a very interesting turn had Davis focused on Yengeni’s own penchant for smart cars. But no doubt he would have got the same answer about economic gaps trotted out with the same grave look of profound concern on his face. 

The conversation would have been quite comical if it were not reflective of the profound moral malaise that the ANC finds itself in at the moment. 

Yengeni’s belief that he, and thousands like him, are entitled to take what belongs to him because he has been deprived of it by a system that discriminated against him for so long, is widespread and deeply entrenched psychologically. And not only within the ranks of the ruling party. 

What is morally right in the present is constantly held hostage to what was morally wrong in the past. The “yes but … ” appears in every sentence of the conversation. Yes, there is corruption but there is inequality. Yes, there is inequality but there is corruption, ad nauseam.

Stephen Grootes, in a recent DM article, talks about a conversation he had with George Mashamba, the chair of the ANC integrity committee, who demonstrated diffidence about the urgency of the need for the commission at best and indifference at worst. Once again, the harder Grootes attempted to get a modicum of genuine concern from Mashamba the more he demonstrated his lack of concern.

There has to be some kind of explanation for this. The integrity gap between the founders of the ANC and the present leadership is so stark that one has to ask what has happened between then and now. 

One explanation is to do with resentment. The difference between Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was that he had absolutely no resentment towards his former persecutors and she was full of it. And as time has gone by she, rather than he, has increasingly become the role model. 

In fact, his penchant for reconciliation rather than resentment is now seen by many as an impediment to the fulfilment of the just cause of liberation. His shares have fallen, hers have risen. 

Resentment is what drives the Julius Malemas, the Dali Mpofus, and the Jacob Zumas of this world. And resentment, as Nietzsche pointed out a long time ago, generates its own system of morality. People who have it create alternative values based on what they have suffered in the past that brought about their subservient position in the present. It sets its own standards of right and wrong. And the master is always wrong. The slave is always right. 

It also creates identities and galvanises movements against injustice, like feminism, the Me Too movement, and Black Lives Matter. So resentment can be justifiable. 

But, as Francis Fukuyama recently pointed out, it also motivates the people who follow Donald Trump in the US, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Marine Le Pen in France. And it can also have profoundly negative consequences not only for the resentful but everyone else around them. 

Thabo Mbeki resented the image of the uncivilised black savage that white racists put on his people for generations. And it was this image that caused him to deny that HIV/Aids was a sexually transmitted disease and the consequent death of millions, as I argued in an article that I wrote fifteen years ago (“Sex, Sorcery, and Stigma – probing some no-go areas of the denial syndrome in the Aids debate”, Journal of Theology in Southern Africa, July, 2006.) 

Racism causes untold damage to the dignity of people. The resentment it causes is justifiable. But we had better be aware of what it can do in its extraordinary propensity to reinvent truth, no matter what the consequences are. DM/MC