The rear-view mirror is the preferred reflector for our government. Far easier to remember the apartheid past, in which most members of the governing party were victims, than the dire times that confront SA.
But even this litigation of the past has both its distortions and its ironies. Take, for example, the latest piece of constitutional nonsense and legislative mischief represented by the new version of the controversial amendment to section 25 of the constitution, the property clause.
In a last-minute ambush of the draft agreed by a majority in the parliamentary ad hoc committee, the ANC has decided to remove a crucial brake against arbitrary dispossession of property. It intends that the minister of land reform, and not the courts, will decide whether the state will pay for land it expropriates, and on the quantum.
This is a nod — a grim replication in fact — to the apartheid past against which the ANC sets its face, for that legal regime was infamous for systematically ousting the jurisdiction of the courts from controversial and rights-delinquent parliamentary acts and regulations. Not simply intent on mimicking its apartheid predecessor, the governing party decided to throw a full-scale assault on the judiciary into its recent wheeze.