Dec 2, 2010 11:29 PM | By BRENDAN BOYLE
Barbara Hogan, one of the ministers President Jacob Zuma sacked recently, has warned of a loss of moral authority and direction in the ANC.
In one of her few public appearances since Zuma reshuffled his cabinet, Hogan said more and more party veterans felt they no longer recognised the movement they had served for so long.
"I have spent so much of my time meeting people who say: 'Eh, this ANC, we don't recognise it anymore; we don't understand it, it's not ours anymore. This is a new phenomenon that is out there'."
Hogan shared second place with Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi yesterday in the DA's annual ranking of ministers.
Speaking at the launch of The Mandela Decade, a book by University of Cape Town professor Ari Sitas about the ANC's first decade home from exile, she referred to Sitas' description of the country moving from the moral authority symbolised by Nelson Mandela to authoritarian populism.
"We have seen so many anarchic forces in the last couple of years that are being unleashed in the popular discourse.
"In those anarchic forces, the danger would be of an appeal to an authoritarian populism because those anarchic forces had unleashed a mobilisation in the absence of a moral leadership and a cadre of politicians who were able to guide that movement in its precarious moments," she said.
"We are definitely at such a moment in this stage of our history. This thing of authoritarian populism is something we have to be very worried about."
Hogan, who chaired parliament's finance committee before joining the executive, cautioned that South Africa might be under-estimating the social effects of the 2008 global recession.
"The fact that our banks and our financial systems survived this particular event has almost led to an illusion and a concealment of how bad the economic situation is," she said.
"In periods of huge depression, all manner of social forces get unleashed."
Though there was discussion about the elitism of black economic empowerment and the loss of more than a million jobs, not enough thought was given to leaders in the struggle for democracy who were later left behind, she said.
"We need to look to history, to what a depression actually can throw up when you throw a million people out into the market; when you throw out many people who believed themselves to be part of the discourse, part of the inner circle.
"What does this mean for social cohesion, the social fabric of a country?"
