WE continue to be troubled by how many in the ANC tend to conflate the line between party and state. We are even more dismayed by the silence of the party leadership each time this happens.

WE continue to be troubled by how many in the ANC tend to conflate the line between party and state. We are even more dismayed by the silence of the party leadership each time this happens.

Last weekend saw at least two manifestations of this fascist mindset.

First, the party decided to use a party occasion to unveil the statue of ANC founder member Sol Plaatje.

While the party is entitled to celebrate its heroes, we cannot wish away that the bust was paid for by the local government and should therefore have been state rather than party fare.

Now we hear some say that the ANC's birthday should be declared a public holiday. This, proponents of this thought say, is because the founding of the organisation was "epoch making" and a progenitor of the present dispensation.

No sane person with the flimsiest grasp of South African history will contest the importance of the ANC in delivering the country to its present station.

But we need to caution against making a party, however heroic, the centre of all life. It is the stuff that totalitarian and fascist regimes are made of.

We do not want to believe that the ANC waged a gallant 82-year struggle to end apartheid to replace the hegemony of one set of party fundamentalism by another - its own.

Someone in the ANC therefore needs to tell those inebriated by triumphalist thoughts that the struggle was waged for a South Africa that all feel they have a stake in.