A week ago, former president Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15-months imprisonment by the Constitutional Court after his conviction for contempt of the same court. The former president had, for reasons he has publicly stated, refused to appear at the commission of inquiry into state capture (the Zondo commission) which, ironically, he had instituted during his time as president.
Following his sentence, there has been an outcry from his supporters who claim that the former president is being persecuted. This outcry, as with many involving political leaders, is anchored on some incoherent brand of “Black Consciousness”. This unintellectual, immoral, opportunistic and degenerate brand is devoid of principle and consistency.
There is a growing tendency in SA of resorting to this pseudo Black Consciousness to defend black leaders engaged in unethical, immoral and downright illegal conduct – and of blackmailing black people into supporting such persons.
The most degenerate of these politics can be seen whenever a black leader is charged with corruption or any other matter. We're then reminded of how white people did worse under apartheid but weren't punished.
We are seeing this even now with the conviction of the former president – an attempt to resort to emotional blackmail about how he fought to liberate us and how worse criminals who facilitated apartheid were not punished.
It is conveniently forgotten that Zuma was the president of this country for eight years and 281 days – the second longest-serving president in the democratic dispensation. In all that time in office, he did absolutely nothing to seek accountability from those white people who today are at the centre of his supporters’ whataboutism.
In fact, it was revealed that in 2015 while he was president, the government not only released apartheid assassin Eugene de Kock on parole, but went on to pay him a salary of R40,000 a month as well as provide him with a state-sponsored safe house.
Today, Zuma's supporters want to blackmail us about how apartheid criminals were treated better, forgetting that Zuma himself was complicit.
Furthermore, there's something fundamentally rotten with the degenerate insistence on using the apartheid regime as a yardstick by which to measure the democratic dispensation. Using the conduct of apartheid criminals as comparison for our black leaders should be unthinkable.
Our leaders fought against apartheid because they understood that it was not only a crime against humanity but was also an immoral system. They sought to fashion a higher civilisation, to create a world very different to the one apartheid was. For this reason, they held themselves to a higher moral standard. We held them to a higher moral standard.
For people to turn around now and use apartheid as a yardstick by which to measure their own morality is not only opportunistic but also vile. It is like using Adolf Hitler as a standard to measure a leader in a democratic dispensation and saying: "I am better than Hitler". Hitler was diabolical and immoral. He was the lowest form of a human being.
A real and progressive leader is supposed to be better than him and to not use Hitler's legacy to juxtapose with their own. Any leader who uses apartheid to measure their own morality is devoid of any morality. Any person who defends a black leader by arguing that apartheid leaders did worse is just as bereft of any virtue.
This whataboutism is a mask for the immorality, incompetence, corruption and lawlessness of some of our own black leaders. It is not Black Consciousness. Black Consciousness is virtuous. It is ethical and consistent. It is grounded in love for black people.
We must refuse to be recruited into this brand of Zuma’s supporters.
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