The South African Federation of Trade Unions turned down an invitation to the congress of the South African Communist Party. SACP is an ally of the ruling African National Congress. SAFTU says SACP is as guilty as the Jacob Zuma government in implementing a neoliberal programme that is anti-poor, anti-working class, pro-capitalist and anti-socialist.

It is not clear what genre the movie unfolding in the South African landscape falls under. Is it a thriller whose plot revolves around the heist of the political system? Or a horror movie, filled with macabre scenes of zombies feasting on the flesh of a dying state? No matter the genre, this is one movie guaranteed to keep South Africans glued to their screens.

President Zuma has always openly derided the intellectual class as “the clevers” because he knows that, at the end of day, they are not prepared or even able to carry out the donkey work of building and nurturing political constituencies and kissing naked, impoverished snotty-nosed kids just to win the vote. The “clevers” are probably too busy analysing the worth of their shares on the stock market. Perfunctory calls for the resignation of a sitting president would entail far more than this attitude.

Stiff-necked apartheid high priests had their problems but none of them contemplated the type of weird political culture the ANC and President Zuma are foisting on post-apartheid South Africa!