ACCORDING to George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If anything, this gives a compelling reason to study history, for it is after all a collection of mankind's successes and failures.
While the fall of the Roman Empire happened for many reasons, two were instrumental: economics and politics. The introduction and later extensive use of slave labour in mining and agriculture made small-scale land ownership unprofitable, forced farmers to sell their land to the wealthy, and caused mass unemployment and food insecurity, which increased food imports and government welfare spending.
All of this affected Roman politics, especially after the introduction of colonial tax farming and the move by ambitious politicians away from republicanism to an individual quest for power, as exemplified by Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon with the army entrusted to him by the senate because Gnaeus Pompeius and the optimates wanted to keep him from the highest political office.
This change in the way of attaining office exposed politicians to the problem of financing electoral support, which basically involved donations from sponsors with private agendas, buying the public through the ancient form of food parcels and populism, extortion of occupied territories' inhabitants and outright corruption, destabilising the security of the empire and causing its later collapse.
Applying the above to the South African context, we see the consequences of almost two decades of ANC government neglect of problems in the agriculture sector due to lack of subsidies and unchecked murders of thousands of farmers, which have made food an open-market commodity in an increasingly insecure environment, causing people essentially to bid for the right to eat and putting severe pressure on salaries.
This led to strikes for increased pay, which when granted brought inflation and further hardship for the medium and lower income social strata.
The ego-driven politics have seen factionalism in the governing party, and a rise in looting of state resources through corruption and crooked tenders, further compromising the already tenuous claim to integrity of both the ANC and its leaders. It has caused South Africa to be viewed as increasingly unstable and a less attractive destination for foreign investors at a time when we are in great need of capital influx, not capital flight.
Like it or not, the current situation is due to the bling-blinded dinosaurs who lead the ANC – men and women who call each other "comrade" but fail to emulate the old European communists' penchant for valuing education and genuine strategic thinking, instead concentrating on spending billions on irrelevant sideshows like the soccer World Cup, Afcon and blue light convoys.
The time for a sentimentality vote is past – we need leaders who have more than three years of schooling or good marks only in woodwork, and we need to get them before South Africa becomes another fossilised specimen frozen in a moment of despair in the world's "museum of basket case states" because its citizens didn't learn from past failures.
M Negres, Port Elizabeth