SOUTH AFRICA'S LANDSCAPE OF POLITICS IS GETTING SATURATED, but continues to lack substance. 

A thing that really should keep South Africans of all credo and social status focused on strategies to unite, cleanse our dialogue, and improve our economic life, is a costly commodity for us, it would seem.

Agang South Africa is a new kid on the block--the proverbial new broom. But does it promise to sweep clean the landscape it is claiming its stake on. The answer is an emphatic NO. So much for building South Africa then.  There are no durable solutions being proposed.

Agang SA's claim to political fame is its proportion to zero in on official corruption along the corridors of the departments of government and eradicate it, once for all. Like rooting up corruption is everything--which is not. And if Agang SA believes the country's troubles stem from the cancer of corruption in public life, well they have another think coming. Our ills are bigger than that.

Stealing from the public purse is not itself much of a problem. It's only an outcome of not doing the right things.

South Africans have abandoned the theme of activism which led us to 1994. This was a theme that sought to fuse into the lives of ordinary people the bitter concept that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White".

Dr. Mamphele Ramphele was in the fold of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) with Steve Biko. The BCM made it its agenda to inflict upon black people a shock-therapy treatment via a crusade of "crude awaking", because, as Biko would say, the idea with a staying power deserves all our energies expended on it than its opposite.  

That used to be what Dr. Ramphele (a medical student at the time) stands for. However, the Black Project of the BCM never came to fruition--Biko died just when it was about to take roots. That vacuum has never been filled since.

So would it not be more relevant to Agang SA to breath new life to that philosophy? Black Africa, even now, is a victim of self-defeating behavioral tendencies. Its sense of historical implications is totally out of step. 

The South African People was never supposed to be passengers in the journey of their own lives. It was never supposed to be an option for the people to be told what was or wasn't good for them. And a good education was supposed to be a compulsory daily ratio for all and sundry--that is what June 16 is supposed to represent.

So Agang SA is proposing to close a gap that doesn't need closing. Put another way, and to paraphrase philosophers, Agang SA is scratching where it does not itch.    

It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black [people] come to [themselves]; to pump back life into [their] empty shells...to remind [them] of [their] complicity in the crime of allowing [themselves] to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of [their] birth. 

We Blacks, I Write What I Like, 1978.