We should, we are told, never speak ill of the dead.

I'm not sure why. I can understand never speaking of death to the ill but the air-brushing of personal and national history that greets the passing of public figures amounts to a damaging and craven hypocrisy.

Piet Koornhof went to his grave this past week with tributes from F W de Klerk and the ANC, accompanied by a parade of jocular tales from political correspondents from the apartheid era who should have known better.

The bewildering obfuscations and blustering gibberish of "Piet Promises" were somehow portrayed as mitigating factors against his track record in office.

We were informed, in approving tones, that he was a man of great intelligence and that he cleverly foretold the folly of separate development in his time at Oxford University. Isn't it utterly damning of the man if he was smart enough to know that what he was doing was both wrong and impractical and yet he did it anyway?

The ANC, of course, was happy to praise him, because he had belatedly joined the party, and once you're in that organisation no ill may be spoken of you at all. The Mafia's omerta or code of silence has nothing on the African National Congress.

Take the late Joe Modise, the first defence minister of the new South Africa, who was nakedly corrupt yet buried with full party honours. Andrew Feinstein's brave new book on the arms deal details how such figures as Trevor Manuel would say things like, "We all know about JM," yet I cannot recall anyone in the party ever speaking publicly and honestly about this scandal.

Modise is protected out of respect for his family and his struggle history - both factors any reasonable person would want to take into account - but, more worryingly, to protect the reputation of the ANC.

Increasingly my alarm bells are ringing around the conflation of state and party. Where ANC members who are critical of government are damned for bringing the party into disrepute. Where loyalty to the party is the determinant of promotion within government as patronage replaces competence and honesty. Where instruments of state, like the intelligence services, are used in party squabbles.

This stuff happens to varying degrees in all ruling parties around the world but most face the real prospect of electoral defeat if they ignore the national interest. Here we are stuck with the ANC for many years to come through the sheer institutional weight of its voting support as the party of liberation.

We all know the African history in this regard - very few electorates on this continent have turfed out such parties inside of 20 years and some never have - but India's Congress party, which ruled for 30 years, and Mexico's PRI, which governed for seven decades, before they both finally collapsed under the weight of their own corrupt incompetence, are other powerful examples.

It's not the ANC's fault, nor is it to their discredit, that two-thirds of the nation votes for the party, but it is to their account if they fail to maintain the subtle yet critical difference between being a government and a political party.

The ANC's traditions are not the nation's. Their rules are not our laws. And the structures of the party are not the framework of government.

There is a brilliant German movie on in Cape Town at the moment which brings home the significance of all of this. The Lives of Others won the Best Foreign Film Oscar (succeeding Tsotsi) for its textured, low-key portrayal of the devastating impact the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi, had on people's lives.

What struck me most was how often the justifiers and puppet masters of the Stasi used "the Party" as the defining motivator.

It was never the nation, the law, humanity, decency or common sense, it was always "the interests of the Party", precisely because they could always own and define the Party's interests without fear of challenge or a point of outside reference. If the ruling clique said it was OK then it was definitively OK.

I am not for one moment suggesting that we are in a comparable state to East Germany, nor is it in any sense inevitable that we will slide into a hopelessly compromised political quagmire like the Mexicans experienced for most of the past century.

We have defied a perceived historical inevitability once in recent times by finding a negotiated end to the immoral works of the likes of Piet Koornhof and we can do it again, but we will need a greater sense of honesty and openness both in life and in death.

And we will need a far less defensive and obsessive president than we have at the moment.

With acknowledgements to Mike Wills and Cape Argus.