Word: anc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many, the ANC's new leader, Jacob Zuma, embodies the party's decay. He won the leadership in late 2007 after a vicious fight with predecessor Thabo Mbeki that split the party - and led to COPE's formation. In 2005 his business adviser, Shabir Shaik, was sentenced to 15 years for soliciting bribes for him, and for years Zuma has faced a related prosecution for corruption, racketeering, fraud, money-laundering and tax evasion. Last month, Shaik secured an early release because of hypertension. On April 6, after three years of trying to bring Zuma to court, the National Prosecuting Authority...
...questions over Zuma's commitment to racial reconciliation - famously, in a country still wracked by racial violence, he chose the Zulu war anthem, "Bring Me My Machine Gun" as a theme song - and about his competence and judgment. He refuses to answer questions on policy, deferring instead to the ANC's executive committee. His coyness may be wise: those opinions he has aired have been startling. On trial for rape in 2006, a charge of which he was acquitted, he revealed he thought a shower could prevent HIV infection. Among his supporters, all that only adds to his appeal: Zuma...
...Struggle The decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white...
...those early years, with Mandela presiding as the founding father of what Tutu dubbed "The Rainbow Nation," diversity, it was said, was no longer a source of division, but one of strength, hope, even beauty. Mandela's embrace of the new vision hid the fact that many in the ANC rank and file were struggling to discard their old monochrome view of the world. The ANC was - and still is - confronting the same dilemma that faces all liberation movements once in power. Simply put: good revolutionaries often make bad democrats. Revolutionaries plot in secret, follow orders and serve the people...
...revolutionaries who failed to make the switch. Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution - some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office only when another revolutionary...