- Madlanga’s lecture revisited OR Tambo’s principles of integrity, selfless service and commitment to the people.
- The applause from political leaders who stand accused of betraying those principles highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of the debate.
- The challenge is to stop relying on memorial lectures and hold living leaders accountable for their conduct.
Retired Justice Mbuyiseni Madlanga delivered the OR Tambo Memorial Lecture at an elite campus a few days ago. I was not there, but I can picture it. In fact, I watched it on SMWX.
Polished wood. Comfortable chairs at the front. The MCs’ welcome. The audience includes ministers, former ministers, board chairmen, tenderpreneurs in exile waiting for the next term, and senior cadres who have long since moved from the trenches to the suburbs.
Madlanga, with that quiet, surgical moral clarity that made him one of our finest judges, invoked Oliver Reginald Tambo. He was doing what we always do at these lectures: imagining OR and contrasting him with his living protégés who have betrayed his teachings and failed to implement his ideals.
He was the man who said cadres must be the first to rally to the defence of the people and the last to seek rewards. OR lived for 30 years in a small house in Muswell Hill, London, without stealing a cent, while his protégés build mansions in Steyn City with money that looks very much like the people’s money.
Then, as always, the same people who betrayed OR stood up to applaud Madlanga for saying they betrayed OR. They applauded statements about the persistence of corruption and the need for drastic action to rescue us from self-destruction. That is the scene we must examine.
The dead cannot challenge those who invoke their names
The irony is perfect and perverse. OR is dead. He died on 24 April 1993. He is not here to correct how he is interpreted or understood. He cannot say, “No, I did not mean that.” He cannot say, “You who are applauding are precisely the men I was warning about in 1985 at the Kabwe Conference.” The dead are polite. They do not interrupt memorial lectures held in their name.
So one wonders why we pay so much to the dead, who do not quite care for what we say and do in their name. We have turned our liberation icons into ancestors we worship once a year, with expensive lectures, wreaths and T-shirts that say “the people’s leader”, and then we go back to doing the exact opposite of what they taught. It is ancestral worship without ancestral obedience.
The real memorial lecture is the conduct of the living
Look at the image that had been circulating in the build-up. OR says, “Let us therefore root ourselves among the people, live their experiences, share their trials and tribulations and, jointly with them, find ways and means to advance our cause at both local and national levels. As in the past, our cadres should be the first to rally to the defence of the people and the last to seek rewards.”
Read that against the other image that has also been in circulation, the one of ANC woman Khuselo Diko opening a tin labelled ANC scandals, and out crawl the worms: political agenda, cover-ups, loyalty not truth, PPE scandal, IDAC manipulation, parliamentary farce, protecting Mchunu, attacks on Masemola.
That tin is the real memorial lecture. That is what the living protégés have done with OR’s legacy. OR said, “Root yourselves amongst the people.” They rooted themselves in procurement committees. OR said, “Live their trials and tribulations.” They live in estates with private water when the people have no water. OR said, “Be last to seek rewards.” They were first to seek rewards, tenders, positions and board seats, and last to defend the people.
Yet on the Friday night, they stood up and applauded Madlanga. Loudly. With a standing ovation. With tears. Screams. Because applause is cheap. It costs nothing. Implementing OR costs everything. It costs your comfort, your kickback, your proximity to power.
It is quite hypocritical for someone who betrays OR to stand up to applaud Madlanga for saying things that they do not do in life. It is like a man who beats his wife every day going to a gender-based violence workshop and giving the keynote speaker a standing ovation.
The applause is not agreement. It is camouflage. It is a way of saying, “See, I also believe in these values; therefore, do not investigate me.” We need to change our attitude to the dead, to OR, Sobukwe, Mandela and Biko.
Stop invoking OR Tambo and confront the living
The dead have done what they needed to do, and their mission is complete. Oliver Tambo did his mission. He kept the ANC together for 30 years in exile when it could have broken into a hundred pieces. He kept the moral compass when others wanted to lose it.
He educated, he lobbied, he suffered exile, he died just days before freedom. His mission is complete. He does not need another lecture. He does not need another street renamed. He does not need us to cry over him once a year. What he needs, if the dead need anything, is for us to leave him alone and confront the living.
We must stop talking about what OR would have said. OR would have said nothing. He is dead. The question is what you are saying and doing. What is the minister doing about the fact that the SAPS is in crisis? What is the MP doing about the IDAC manipulation and the parliamentary farce? What is the deployed cadre doing about the PPE scandal and protecting comrades instead of the people? What are BEE beneficiaries doing with their millions?
We should focus on the living and speak directly about what they are doing or not doing. Instead of saying OR Tambo taught us integrity, we should say, “Minister, you have no integrity. You have betrayed integrity.” Instead of saying OR taught us to root ourselves amongst the people, we should say, “You are not rooted amongst the people. You are rooted amongst contractors. Show us your lifestyle audit.”
Madlanga’s lecture was important not because it told us about OR, but because it held a mirror to the living. The tragedy is that those who looked in the mirror thought they were looking at someone else. There must be a way to activate the living to contribute to the society that OR envisaged. And it will not happen through more memorial lectures at elite campuses where the elite applaud themselves.
Three steps towards accountability
It will happen when we do three things. First, we must make hypocrisy expensive. Applause must have consequences. If you stand up to applaud OR’s principle that cadres must be the last to seek rewards, then tomorrow we must audit your rewards. If you applaud OR’s call for selfless service, tomorrow you must declare your business interests. Let the standing ovation be entered into the record and used as your own confession.
Second, we must move the lecture from the elite campus to the township hall, to the taxi rank, to the clinic that has no medicine. OR did not root himself at Wits. He rooted himself in Lusaka, in Morogoro, in the camps. Let the OR Tambo Lecture be delivered in Alex, in front of people who live his trials and tribulations, and let the minister who wants to applaud come and explain why there is still no water after 30 years.
Third, we must retire the dead. Let us thank them and let them rest. We pay too much homage to the dead because homage to the dead is safe. It does not require you to fire anyone, to arrest anyone, to cancel a tender. Honouring the living by demanding that the living do what OR did is dangerous. It requires courage.
The living must carry the responsibility
OR was not a saint. He was an ordinary man who did extraordinary things because he understood his moment. He looked ordinary, like Thabo Mbeki looked ordinary in the TRC gallery. He did not need a reserved seat. That was his power, the power to be ordinary and to serve. Our generation wants to be extraordinary without service. We want the statue without the sacrifice.
So yes, Madlanga spoke well. He always does. But justice is not a lecture. Justice is what happens after the lecture, when the lights are off, when the elite campus is empty, when the same man who applauded goes back to his office and signs a document that protects one corrupt comrade and attacks another, that chooses loyalty over truth, that turns parliament into a farce.
OR cannot stop him. OR is dead. Only the living can stop the living.
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