ANC can act fast

It has taken the African National Congress (ANC) 14 years to not solve the electricity crises. It has taken it 30 years not to address land reform in a meaningful way, and a similar amount of time not to provide education, healthcare, and safety for many of its citizens. It has, in the roughly 20 years of the Zimbabwean decline, failed to assist the people of the country.

It has taken it six months not to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. And it has taken forever for it never to criticise Iran or Cuba.

But it took the ANC and the department of international relations and cooperation (Dirco) an impressive 36 hours to assess the conflict in Israel. One has to assume that in that time, they needed to gather the facts, determine who was at fault, determine the impact of writing not one but two lengthy pieces, proofread and fact check them, and publicise them.

Impressive indeed! Especially for an organisation that seems to stop its internal battles only for lunch and perhaps a bit of pilfering.

Which proves that if motivated correctly, the ANC is capable of decisive action.

As an optimist and someone who seeks opportunity in every challenge, I began to wonder if there isn’t a way to harness the knowledge that the ANC, when motivated out of hate for the Jewish State, is able to act.

What if, for example, we called the electricity crises a Jewish power problem? What if we told Naledi Pandor that victims of crime in South Africa are Palestinians? If the party could, in just a few hours, decode and simplify the complexity of the Middle East along with the required knowledge of its history, nuance, and influence of religion as well as concerns about proxy nations like Iran funding and orchestrating the conflict, one can only imagine what it could do in South Africa where it has knowledge and jurisdiction. No doubt the electricity crises would be solved by Friday afternoon at the very latest, and crime would be done and dusted by the following Monday.

It might sound absurd to deliberately blame Jews for something that they aren’t responsible for, but considering that the ANC is doing this in any event when it comes to Israel, the approach is hardly new. The advantage of blaming the Jews in this case is that we might as well get something positive out of it.

Sadly, the ANC wouldn’t be the first to scapegoat Jews for the sake of the country. And unfortunately, as history well knows, it will hardly be the last. Jews have been scapegoated by those way more impressive than the ANC.

The statements by Dirco and the ANC are unsurprising. They are factually absurd, deliberate in obfuscation of the truth, and antisemitic in approach.

As an organisation, the ANC’s view of international affairs is irrelevant. Outside of South Africa, it’s hard to imagine that anyone cares what it thinks – the result of its relentless and at times embarrassing support of the world’s human-rights abusers.

If there’s a lesson to be learned over the past week, it’s not that the ANC has a visceral, irrational, and blinding hatred for the Jewish State. It is that this obsession is the one thing that spurs it into action. Which is why I need to tell it that just up the road, there’s a pothole with the word “Haifa” written in the centre.