I got ready in the dark this morning. One, because it’s almost the depth of winter now so the sun doesn’t come up until, like, noon. Secondly, because I was cold and too lazy to switch on a light. But more importantly, because I thought to myself, “I have this.”
But it only took me turning on the wrong tap in the shower, my toothpaste covering only half of my toothbrush and the other half in the sink, and putting on two different socks to realise that, actually, I did indeed not “have this.”
The same feeling of “we got this” came moments after President Cyril Ramaphosa was re-elected as president in 2024. Not because of his election, but because of National Coloured Congress (NCC) leader Fadiel Adams stunning rebuke of Ramaphosa.
It was a warning to the president that things had to change, that he could no longer let corruption and crime run amok. It was a caution that Ramaphosa was accountable to communities and the average South African, not funders and mafia bosses.
It was a stirring speech which gave me hope that a leader who was still in touch with issues on the ground would finally hold the president to account, without excuses and the baggage of bias.
Less than two years later, and this week, that hope was being carried away in a police van, with a cigarette in his mouth and the declaration “I probably needed a holiday anyway”.
More ‘wasted years’?
Adams has had a turbulent time as MP over the last year and 10 months, with allegations of leaking classified information and interfering with police investigations, just the latest in a series of incidents that have seen him hog the spotlight.
A crime-busting avenger is what he wants South Africans to see him as, but his dodging arrest and allegation-filled outbursts as he was being carried away in cuffs blurred that image.
He will now wait for a court of law to decide whether the charges against him are true or, as he claims, a vendetta against him. But perhaps he should use the time to reflect on what he has done with the responsibility given to him by the South Africans who gave him their vote.
“Mr President, the coloured people are dying, and this house has done nothing about it,” he declared in June.
But how has Adams used his platform to make material change to crime and squalor in underdeveloped areas? How has he helped the communities that he accused Ramaphosa of neglecting? Has he made empty promises to the very people he accused the president of lying to?
Has being an MP benefited his voters or just himself?
He has been outspoken and held many to account in the chambers of parliament, but unless that leads to actual change, it is hard to see it as anything other than grandstanding and politicking for his supper.
