ANC transformation 'like apartheid'
2010-09-17 22:08
Cape Town - The ANC's version of transformation was a crude replica of apartheid, Western Cape Premier Helen Zille said on Friday.
Addressing a meeting of the Black Management Forum in Cape Town, she said that under the ANC's definition, organisations or individuals were "transformed" only if their ideology agreed with that of the party.
"This is how a white judge who finds for the ruling party in a court case can be said to be 'transformed'," she said.
"But a black judge who asserts his constitutionally enshrined independence is somehow 'untransformed'."
Complete transformation had occurred when an organisation or an individual thought and talked like the ANC, and acted according to its wishes.
For the party, transformation was about cadre deployment and power.
"It is about extending the tentacles of the ruling party into every aspect of society. It is a political project. It has little to do with changing the circumstances of the previously disadvantaged," she said.
"The more successful the ANC is in its transformation project, the more South Africa resembles the apartheid era.
"Pliant judges, a public prosecutor appointed to do the ruling party's bidding, a party broadcaster instead of a public broadcaster, a media threatened with censorship, an intelligence service dominated by ruling party apparatchiks. Sound familiar?"
Zille said real transformation could not be achieved by manipulating outcomes, only by extending opportunity in a bottom-up process.
Pursuing it on this basis would be reason for great optimism.
"It would give us hope that we may yet avoid the crude replica of apartheid that the ANC wants to impose on us in the name of transformation," she said.
Zille also revealed that she had asked Congress of SA Trade Unions general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi to address the Western Cape cabinet on his suggestion that all ministers of state undergo a lifestyle audit.
Vavi had agreed and would be engage in talks early in October.
- SAPA