Z-word does P-word as we wait for C-word
The sight of a military deployment in the parliamentary precinct in Cape Town on Thursday outraged the commentariat across the ideological spectrum, and rightly so. But nowhere on their pages is there a mention of the C-word, or the P-word, for that matter. What went wrong?
Earlier last week, after the news broke of the decree by the commanderin-chief for 441 armed soldiers to help maintain law and order during the state of the nation address, Schwätzer everywhere bristled with excitement in a haze of vaped nicotine, but nowhere in any substance abuse area did anyone dare speak the C-word.
Surely he-who-must-not-be-named could not possibly be deploying the army in anticipation of a coup d’état?
The EFF is sartorially underequipped to pull off such a stunt and the namby-pamby, if litigious, DA would blanche at the suggestion. The rest, well, they are hardly more than authoritarian dictatorships in waiting (for a coalition offer, perhaps). The chatterers were right — there was no coup on the way.
But they were also wrong. The Z-word entity was not protecting Parliament or democracy or even himself against a coup attempt — he was the coup. And he did it right under our noses, in plain sight. When SA woke up to the fact on Thursday, political power had long been transferred from legitimate parliamentary majority rule to a self-serving elite. The nation never saw it coming because we were looking at the wrong word to describe what had happened.
Coups are usually classified in a historical taxonomy (as described by the political scientist Samuel Huntington) and illustrated by examples of events past. This suggests that if the violent overthrow of constitutional rule is not historically classifiable to match any of the examples, it is not a coup. This misapprehension is made worse by the arbitrary substitution of coup with the P-word — that is, putsch.
But if we must have a historical reference for what the Z-entity has perpetrated, the closest event is probably the 1934 Röhm Putsch in Germany, when Hitler ordered the purge of his paramilitary force, the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts under command of Ernst Röhm. That was the night the long knives came out.
Now substitute Brownshirts with Red-onesies and a po-faced DA, and you’ll find that what happened was a violent purge of Parliament, executed by the Z-entity’s Whiteshirts backed by the Wehrmacht outside.
What happened on Thursday was just one ignominious moment in the history of the advance of dictatorial rule in SA.
The coup/putsch analogy may be a little facile or not literal enough, but the effect is the same. SA is now ruled by an unelected elite that has not the slightest intention of serving the country, holds in disdain the weak and disempowered and has no qualms in using extreme force to consolidate and maintain its rule.
THE Z-WORD ENTITY WAS NOT PROTECTING PARLIAMENT OR DEMOCRACY OR EVEN HIMSELF AGAINST A COUP — HE WAS THE COUP
What, if that outcome does not define it, is a coup d’état? Joleen Steyn Kotze, a researcher at the University of the Free State, proposes a similar advance on the concept (in The Conversation) with the idea of a constitutional coup, the “third-term tragedy”, in which African presidents change a country’s constitution to allow them to become presidents for life. The Z-entity has not yet changed SA’s Constitution, but perverting it amounts to the same thing and it has the same outcome: a change from rule by consent to rule by force. And that means any force, such as venality or ignorance, not necessarily armed force. Still, the thing needs a name, with which former public protector Thuli Madonsela obliged when she immortalised the idea of state capture.
The timing was pinned down by BDFM editor-in-chief Peter Bruce, who recently wrote: “There was a moment when state capture began. It was on Wednesday, June 8 2011, when Public Enterprises Minister Malusi Gigaba told a shocked Cabinet of plans to fire the chairmen at Eskom, Denel and Transnet and took a blade to almost all the nonexecutives on the Eskom and Denel boards.”
What went wrong in Parliament on Thursday was that while the nation held its breath waiting (or hoping) for a violent coup to happen, the army put a ceremonial touch to state capture.