'There is no room for sentimentality in politics and I am no mood to put a rosy gloss on where we are now.' – Ben Turok

'I have been "in the struggle" for 69 years. I have worked with most of the top leaders of the ANC and its Alliance partners and grew in experience and stature in their company. Maverick MP sets out to describe and analyse the years in power, the achievements and the failures. It is now necessary to be objective as possible about the present condition of the ANC and its government, admitting the layer of uneasiness that is tangible everywhere, which lies like a haze over the body politic, threatening its future. There is a pervasive sense of disappointment with the character of the ANC today, its loss of direction and the slippage from its historical mission. That mission I have always understood to be to liberate the masses from poverty, discrimination and exploitation, and to win for them basic rights, human dignity and a measure of control over their own lives.

'This book will search for the sources of the decline and record my experience as a participant. I write as an insider, but not so deeply embedded as to need to be defensive. So this is no lament about what might have been, nor is it written in bitterness. I do not feel, as some who were participants, that my lifelong commitment has been betrayed. Rather, I want to stand back and try to work out what has gone wrong and why.'