A very popular culture that took hold of our organisation, the African National Congress (ANC), is that the only qualification you need to be anything in government or BEE companies (in bed with the ANC), is to become an ANC deployee, which means a “brainless and spineless” obedient tunzela who shall implement even at his or her own expense political decisions that is in stark conflict with the RSA Constitution and its’ subject laws.
Menzi Simelane learnt the hard way that this does not pay. He will die on record an improper person who is dishonest, has no conscientiousness and or integrity because he unquestioningly administered a political decision opposite to Adv Vusi Pikoli whom he famously claim does not know anything about taking political instructions.
This MenziSimelanism is in fact a description befitting most political appointees in government and that is why we are struggling to get a professional public civil service focus primarily on implementing executive decisions of municipal councils, provincial cabinets and national cabinet within the strict confines of the South African Constitution and its subject laws.
A professional civil servant would know and be confident (no fear of victimisation) to report to the police any executive decision which seeks to operate outside the applicable law the civil servant is bound to uphold and in terms of which he or she is to implement executive decisions.
It is only when civil servants fear the law more than their political (five year term) masters, that we will have a professional public service. That was what the ANC was supposed to have implemented the past 18 years.
Now we have still the apartheid mentality civil servant who fear the politician more than the law in a ten times worse form. Why worse because every time public servants act unprofessional, they send-out a message with most probably a Black person belonging to us as the majority that it is OK to disobey the law and to rather obey political decisions.
Political decisions which do not concern itself much with justice or prescripts of the law but majority vote like the gang who has the most members rule the township. No wonder at grassroots level people are saying politicians are gangsters. The ordinary folk know how gangsters operate.
The client of the unprofessional public servant takes his or her obedience to political decisions absent of legal criteria and justice home and sits and talks about the ANC way of doing things in government right under a picture of Nelson Mandela hanging most probably proudly in his or her home. Respect is lost. Respect for all our contributions and suffering to come this far most probably permanently destroyed amongst a section of people in a township by one act of an ANC deployee in the local municipality, provincial and or local government.
What we will be left with in the end is a historic ANC in the form of memorabilia in South African museums as former political prisoners like me already are as prison guides on Robben Island.
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