Newspaper Article

It's not too late to change AmaBenzi culture

Kasrils, Ronnie

2009

Overview

The article was entitled \"The Corridors to Corruption\" and its warnings about the pitfalls ahead for the struggle generation, and the dangers of falling into them, are prescient and uncanny. The article was accompanied by a cartoon of a limousine with motor-cycle outriders and a pedestrian remarking: \"There goes a 'Man of the People'.\" [Rusty Bernstein] considered how a process that had corroded the moral integrity of good honest revolutionaries once power had been achieved could well be repeated in South Africa. He considered the metamorphosis from Comrade to Minister of the typical respected People's Leader whose life had formerly been devoted to serving the poor and oppressed in an exemplary way. He imagined, sensitively and not without sympathy, how the new lifestyle - limousine with chauffeur and bodyguards, ministerial residence with retinue of servants, Champagne and smoked salmon, the demands of \"protocol\" and \"security\" - could come to take charge. Bernstein did not hold the view that power must inevitably corrupt. But he argued that we must understand that the \"trappings of power\", passed on from generation to generation, system to system - if unchanged - kept the policy makers separate from the people, underpinned existing power relations and insulated them from the forces of change. In reference to the Freedom Charter, he reminded us that \"the ending of white supremacy... requires the total overturn of the status quo\" of which the existing apparatus of state was an essential part. \"Since the trappings of state power serve to uphold the status quo,\" he argued, \"the trappings of protocol and privilege which surround apartheid power must be essentially hostile to our cause.\"

• Publisher: Independent Online (South Africa)
• Subject: Bernstein, Rusty