Paul Ngobeni
Pretoria - Tourism Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s candidacy for the position of ANC president will, for a considerable period in the coming months, give the incumbent ANC president, Cyril Ramaphosa, sleepless nights.
Ramaphosa and his closest allies have been mired in serious allegations of corruption, criminal activities and sexual harassment allegations.
Purely to ensure his own political survival, Ramaphosa is poised to unleash a well-orchestrated strategy to ensure that his political rivals are eliminated or seriously hobbled before the ANC elective conference in December.
One target of that nefarious strategy is likely to be Sisulu, who has already been subjected to a defamatory campaign of vilification emanating from both within the ANC and reactionary right-wing forces hell-bent on maintaining the status quo.
Surely Sisulu has distinguished herself as a humble servant of the people and remains untainted by the many corruption scandals and financial shenanigans that have engulfed many of her colleagues and potential rivals for the ANC leadership.
For starters, the state capture commission (Zondo Commission) issued a series of damning reports implicating or condemning senior ANC members caught up in corruption and so-called state capture.
Sisulu’s stellar reputation as a fierce anti-corruption fighter remains intact as she was not associated in any manner with the corruption widely believed to have captured her ANC colleagues. That is not surprising as her work as a member of Cabinet under four ANC presidents speaks for itself.
She served as minister of housing, minister of defence and military veterans, minister of public service and administration, minister of international relations, minister of human settlements, water and sanitation and minister of tourism.
Sisulu showed her true mettle as a tough anti-corruption crusader when she was minister of public service and administration for only two years.
There she focused on key areas of reform, which included the professionalising of the public service for higher productivity and value for money, and the finalisation of the constitutional requirements of Chapter 10 in respect of uniform standards and prescripts.
She swiftly made it illegal for civil servants to be involved in companies that benefit from state contracts.
She aimed to stop officials manipulating tenders in favour of a company that they had joined once it had secured the state’s business.
Her Public Administration and Management Bill proposed punishments that include a one-year jail sentence, fines and the cancellation of the contracts in question. That was not all.
When Sisulu assumed duties as minister of defence and military veterans, she inherited a demoralised military with simmering grievances over pay and appalling conditions of service.
Within three months of her appointment on August 19, 2009, soldiers in the SANDF illegally marched on the Union Buildings in defiance of two military orders and a court order.
Soldiers tried to climb the fence surrounding the government complex during their protest to demand better salaries.
Police used water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the soldiers after the march turned violent.
Sisulu quickly recognised that the solution lay not in blame games, but in addressing the poor conditions that gave rise to the angry demonstrations and lawlessness.
She immediately introduced major reforms such as the Defence Force Service Commission. Its mandate is to make recommendations on a number of matters for the department and the minister.
Some of those matters include annual improvement of salaries and service benefits for members of the SANDF, policies in respect of conditions of service, and promotion of measures and standards to ensure the effective and efficient implementation of policies on conditions of service.
Sisulu is widely credited with having brought long-lasting changes and improvements to the lives of the SANDF service men and women.
Sisulu also established the office of the Military Ombud to investigate and ensure that complaints against the SANDF are resolved.
She brought similar leadership and innovation during her service as minister of intelligence.
In the area of human settlements, it is beyond dispute that under Sisulu’s leadership, the government has built more than 4.7 million houses for the poor and marginalised.
Undoubtedly, the challenges are enormous and will persist for years to come – the housing backlog remains at about 2.2 million.
Without question, Lindiwe Sisulu inherited from both her parents a fighting spirit and passionate hatred of injustice.
At a very early age she became one of the distinguished torch-bearers during the anti-apartheid Struggle and was forced into exile, where she continued to fight as an underground operative against the apartheid regime.
Her role as a liberation war fighter and a committed member of the ANC youth structures is shown by the following: she was a member of Masupatsela of the ANC, and was a student activist.
She was detained by the apartheid regime without trial for political activities and held in solitary confinement (1976-1977).
Upon her release she went into exile in Mozambique and underwent military training in the Soviet Union (1977-1979).
She received the highest award of the USSR Defence Force (Award of the Red Star). She later returned to South Africa as part of the advance team to prepare for negotiations in 1990.
Sisulu’s enormous contribution to the debates about rule of law and our constitutional development must be appreciated against this background.
Unlike many of her ANC colleagues who thrive on attacking her for the benefit of their capitalist handlers, Sisulu has understood that societies that emerge from colonial oppression, apartheid, and neo-colonialism must not simply be content with maintaining the status quo and the formalistic declaration of rights within a neo-liberal constitutional framework.
Sisulu also understands transformative constitutionalism in its full dimensions.
As an Indian court remarked in the Navtej Singh Johar case: “The whole idea of having a constitution is to guide the nation towards a resplendent future.
“Therefore, the purpose of having a constitution is to transform society for the better, and this objective is the fundamental pillar of transformative constitutionalism.”
Clearly those who have savagely attacked Sisulu for her recent statements on the failure of our Constitution and judiciary are those who are still fixated on formalistic neoliberal concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, constitutionalism, and judicial independence.
They forget that the whole idea of having a constitution is to guide a nation towards a better future.
It is when the sides pull together towards the vindication of human dignity, human rights, non-racialism, non-sexism and the rest, that the unity of the country’s laws in their service figures as a true value.
As Sisulu has previously reminded us, concepts such as the “rule of law” can be hijacked for nefarious purposes by forces that represent the very antithesis of democracy and the rule of law.
After all, apartheid and Nazism were also underpinned by the “rule of law”.
However, we know that the horrors these systems visited upon their victims provide ample evidence that the rule of law without social justice and without bringing about substantive changes or improvement in the lives of ordinary people can be no better than apartheid or Nazi “law and order”.
Contrary to the predictions of prophets of doom and naysayers, the ANC is not on the verge of an implosion or loss of power in 2024. It simply needs committed and uncorrupted leadership, such as that of Sisulu.
She is not tethered to big money capitalists and is unencumbered by financial shenanigans or acts of malfeasance in government.
She is the strong ANC leader single-mindedly focused on building a capable, ethical and competent developmental state, which is a crucial facilitator for the successful execution of the government’s goals of achieving the targets of the 2030 National Development Plan.
She will lead the charge to develop the economy, create jobs and improve the conditions of society’s standard of living through a proper corruption-free judicial system.
Sisulu’s political enemies were sorely disappointed – they waited with bated breath for her name to be implicated in the Zondo Commission’s state capture reports. She was not mentioned even once as a corrupt politician. Not once was she associated even remotely with corrupt tenders in the government.
Just because she is a woman, she has been subjected to name-calling and belittling epithets such as “princess”, daughter of “ANC royalty”, simply all in an effort to devalue both her leadership in government and in the ANC.
Of course, none of her male counterparts whose parents were also Robben Island political prisoners were ever subjected to these demeaning epithets.
No amount of misogynist propaganda shall succeed in sidelining Sisulu from the battle for the ANC’s renewal as it continues its journey to cleanse itself and recover its original values; the battle for the soul of our nation as the ANC gears itself up for the tough electoral battles in 2024, the continued struggle of the black majority for social, economic and racial justice, and the renewed determination to fight the scourge of corruption that poses an existential threat to the remarkable gains the democratic ANC-led government has made since the advent of democracy in 1994.
Pretoria News