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Friends & Friction: We can stop this silly season madness

YEP! It’s that time of the year again, the silly season.

It is silly in more ways than one – death on the roads, death at shebeens and death at work as people become too excited about going home for the holidays, or are just too tired to focus.

This year, there is another element to it. The governing party is putting its candidate forward, the man or woman who will lead South Africa for the next few years.

Anxiety is in the air as pigsty politics bubble up, but that is the nature of democracy – just as wetness comes with rain.

Friends, let’s accept that the revolution has been hijacked, but one of the party’s former senior leaders, Harry Gwala, used to say that the ANC is like a river that cleanses itself.

Upstream, the water can be full of mud, but downstream, it will be so clean and so pure that you can see the riverbed.

I humbly submit that no organisation, whether in business, religion or politics, can cleanse itself by abandoning its core values.

In the liberation movement, open campaigning was forbidden for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, it can be divisive and open wounds that can never be healed, which leads to splinter groups that can never be put together again.

Secondly, it exposes the prospective leaders to corrupt lobbyists.

Open campaigning is also very expensive – who buys the T-shirts and the food that is served at gatherings? Who pays for the use of stadiums and buses?

If a third party pays for them, what is the size of the debt; what are the repayment terms; and, more dangerously, what are the spoils once the high chair has been won?

In my view, all the candidates who’ve put their names forward must be disqualified for exposing the movement, the revolution and the country to dangerous forces.

Friends, it is the silly season and my mind is tired, so allow me to quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Poor Folk: “Do not despise me because I am such an insignificant old fellow that a fly could break me with its wing.”

Do not despise me because I am not a political commentator.

I learnt my politics from humble activists, such as Mandla Madi from KwaThema, as well as Sipho Shezi, an ANC cadre who founded the DCO Matiwane Youth League in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal.

They believed that politics is a means to help the people and advance society, and not a vehicle to serve personal and parochial interests.

We who are enslaved by our own consciences, and oppressed by the inviolability of principle, sometimes have reason to envy pigs, which know neither.

They are free to eat everything that the earth offers, no matter where it comes from and no matter how dirty.

But those who have chained themselves to integrity will always be spared the price the pig has to pay, for once a swine is bought, it must bring bacon to the table.

Friends, unlike winter, the silly season is not a natural occurrence. It is man-made and we don’t have to accept it.

We can bring down the number of deaths on the roads, people don’t have to die while having fun and, most importantly, we don’t have to sell our country to invisible sharks through old salesmen or saleswomen who have no future to think of.

I read a post on Facebook recently that said something to this effect:

“The future is not something that we leave for our children, but a loan that we borrow from them.”

Perhaps if we all think this way, we’ll turn this silly season into a truly festive one.

*Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency

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