I spent my Saturday watching Narcos, a retelling of the life story of Pablo Escobar, arguably the most powerful and most consequential Colombian figure the world has ever known. The native intelligence of Escobar, his unlimited imagination, his ability to centralise power, Escobar vs the State of Colombia, there was something universal about it, the survival instinct of a man, using all the tools at his disposal.

The first lesson from the life of Escobar is that bad guys don’t play by the rules. That’s of course what makes them bad but more important, it’s what makes them win. The primary trait you witness in such a man is that you must know everything about your environment, everything about those in power, especially their weaknesses and secrets, and know your enemies even more.

The second lesson is that money, as with cocaine, hijacks the pleasure centres of the brain. A rat will choose cocaine over food and water, it will choose cocaine over sleep, over sex, over life itself. The human brain doesn’t work quite the same as that of a rodent. Unless we’re talking cocaine or money.

If human beings cannot be captured by money, they can surely be threatened by whatever intelligence you have on them – knowing where their wives work, where their kids go to school, and just how much access they have in those places. You either love money or you fear intelligence.

With these two weapons, you can capture senior police officers in all nine provinces, you can buy senior prosecutors, the judges, even Members of Parliament; you can literally buy impunity.

Such survival instincts usually start at a tender age. Growing up poor, surviving your place of birth, poverty, hustling, becoming somebody through sheer force of will, and bending a few rules, and finally making it into mainstream society’s upper echelons, and wanting to stay there.

“You had respect when you built houses for the poor, but when you did not get respect from a herd of egocentric bureaucrats, you threw a tantrum” – on the back of helping the poor, and coming from a poor background himself, Pablo ran for office on that ticket and won a congressional seat in the House of Representatives in Colombia.

This shocked the establishment and soon an effort to try to stop him ensued. On his first day in the assembly, Pablo was shown a mugshot by the department of justice of his arrest way back when he was still surviving on the streets and this meant he would be disqualified as a congress member. He vowed that he would fight to the bitter end. He viewed this as a message that he did not qualify to be part of the established elite club, and he could not take it. He was a thug, a convict, a drug dealer, but he still had ambitions to be president. But the system locked him out and he was prepared to bring the system down in order to stay at the top.

As he had fought all his life to get what he wanted, he declared war against the Colombian government, killing everyone who stood in his way, bringing the whole country into a war zone and to the brink of civil war, just so that he would remain in congress and hopefully become president one day.

How can the ambitions and needs of one man bring the whole country to its knees? Was he blind to the damage his actions were bringing to the country or, as he had always done all his life, was he just trying to survive in his new position in life, whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice?

This brings to question the multiple intentions of those who have fought for and fought side by side with the poor. Once they rise out of poverty,  they will sacrifice even the poor to stay out of poverty.

If by legal prescripts you do not qualify to be president, if you were genuine, you would find other ways to serve.

This is by far the greatest preoccupation of the ANC. How do we develop the type of comrade that we can count on, to sacrifice every personal ambition to help create this particular democratic society, equal, prosperous and united?

Since all comrades have sacrificed for the poor, how do we identify those who did it not as a personal strategy to stand on the shoulders of the poor and leave the poor people behind?

Fortunately people have patterns in their lives and we must be vigilant in who we give the levers of the state to.

People survive, they go out of their way to ensure durability in their newfound positions and they will do anything, get rid of anyone who stands in their way, pile up body bags so that they may maintain their lofty heights.

It is worse when they know that they are undeserving of those lofty heights.

They begin heavy power consolidation.

God help us all! DM

Yonela Diko is ANC Western Cape Spokesman