Ship of fools is part of Zuma’s revenge

Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Hypernormalisation, is his most unnerving yet. Beautifully produced, the film is just sequences of grainy, archived political encounters, the intention being to shatter the myths surrounding the origins of this generation’s most asymmetrical power centres. His conclusions are contentious, particularly on Donald Trump’s victory in the US, which he described as “part of a pantomime”.

Applying Curtis’s formula of history, the information age and economics to understand why President Jacob Zuma has wrecked the ANC with such apparent abandon dismantles two popular theories: the first that party factionalism is a new phenomenon and that Zuma has no political strategy.

Long before 1994 there were two profiles competing for control of the ANC. The first was the Mells Park House negotiator — the urbane, sophisticated exile who was fundamentally reasonable. The second belonged to the group Zuma ultimately came to represent — who loathed the worldly kind and were furious at the concessions they had supposedly made to the enemy. This made them profoundly unreasonable.

In an attempt to smother the festering contempt between these profiles, the ANC overcompensated with annual celebrations, the scale of which remains unprecedented.

But for a few exceptions, the Cabinet ministers and parastatal bosses Zuma appointed are not leaders but symbolic consequences. “Here”, Zuma seems to be saying as he holds this profile to the world, “this is the real face of dispossession — this irrational, inferior person with an unhealthy suspicion of the world is exactly what was created, not your snooty Anglophile schooled in classic economic theory.”

But there was another reason he appointed this profile. Happily, he realised the more mistakes his appointments inevitably made, the more illogical their behaviour, the more desensitised the public would become. The more detached civil society was, the more he could leverage his strategy — based on a combination of the revenge for humiliation and loss, and a sense of cultural entitlement.

Zuma’s election was fortunate timing; objectivity became a casualty of the world’s thinking. In 2009, Brazil’s Lula da Silva remarked that white people were responsible for the global financial crisis.

Thanks to an increasingly fashionable media intent on determining the pace of the world, the comparison of former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith’s humble Peugeot to South African Cabinet ministers’ wild cavalcades was suddenly considered deeply offensive.

Protecting Cabinet ministers and his appointments was not in his interest as this threatened to reveal his broader stratagem. His followers were convinced that his appointments reflected his loyalty to the peasantry, but the task of insulating appointees from the consequences of their multiple indiscretions was awarded to a group that has risen to prominence.

This group consists of self-promoting peasants with social media accounts who have succeeded in simplifying issues — such as state capture — into confrontations between black and white.

Even by his own feeble standards, Zuma’s speech in December 2015 when he attempted a veiled justification for his axing of then finance minister Nhlanhla Nene was shocking. But there was a moment in which he revealed himself, when he said something about “if someone doesn’t know their history then they will only think about revenge”.

That wasn’t coincidental. He spoke without notes — and when he does this, he speaks for himself. He would never dare utter the word “revenge” in a formal setting; his continuation of the Mandela line of forgiveness has only ever been an illusion.

Revenge to him isn’t driving a certain demographic into the sea but shoving his thumb in the nose of global expectations that he believes were based on a slanted and misrepresented history, driving down standards of merit and performance and establishing an environment of obfuscation, where nothing is accomplished and where nothing takes forever.

So he thrives on disappointment, be it the sight of Bathabile Dlamini slurring through another speech or Faith Muthambi’s defiant dishonesty to the highest order of oversight.

“I have created a government in my own image,” he says, “the angry, injured peasant isn’t smart or responsible but only what I need him to be. And when you can’t watch him cocking everything up any longer, I will extract precisely what I feel I deserve.”

HE REALISED THE MORE MISTAKES HIS APPOINTMENTS INEVITABLY MADE, THE MORE DESENSITISED THE PUBLIC WOULD BECOME