Ramaphosa wraps his crude pitch in childhood magic

Iunderstand if you didn’t watch last week’s state of the nation address. There was other, more interesting, programming on offer, like infomercials for antifungal foot cream. Besides, it’s all starting to feel faintly undignified, like watching some once-majestic creature of the deep, washed up by a freak weather event, quietly explode on a beach.

Still, there was one part of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s speech that captured the public imagination, or at least shot it with a dart and threw a tarp over it: the brief tale of a young woman called Tintswalo.

In the past few years consultants have discovered what young children have known for a million years, namely that nothing penetrates a tired brain like a story. Accordingly, dry PowerPoint presentations have been replaced by an army of mediocre Hans Christian Andersens, or at least by a kind of fungible corporate storytelling machine–Hans Christian Andersen Pty Ltd if you will, dedicated to conjuring up little mermaids before selling them to a fishmonger.

It’s cynical, of course, and very dishonest, this business of wrapping crude sales pitches in a veneer of creativity and childhood magic. But for Ramaphosa’s speechwriters, inventing Tintswalo was, I have to admit, a fairly elegant way of taking his audience back 30 years and reminding it of the gigantic steps the ANC took in dragging Mlungustan back from the bloody cusp of war towards true democracy, statehood, and the first threads of a social safety net.

But having breathed life into Tintswalo, Dr Frankenwhine promptly abandoned his creation and wandered away. Granted, it was perfectly in keeping with the ANC’s penchant for caring about the proletariat for only as long as it is politically useful, but still, I’d got invested and I was sorry to see her go.

So much so, in fact, that at the weekend I found myself thinking of all those parts of her life we didn’t get to hear about, like the afternoon in 1998, just as little Tintswalo was going down for a nap in her granny’s new RDP house, when the ministry of minerals & energy published a white paper stating that “Eskom’s present generation capacity surplus will be fully utilised by about 2007”.

(Tintswalo didn’t know what that meant, because she was four. I don’t know what excuse the rest of the ANC had, but here we are.)

The president also didn’t have time to paint a more complete picture of Tintswalo’s years at school. We weren’t told, for example, about her happy first year in 2001, when she learned to spell “Tintswalo” and we learned to spell “Joe Modise” and “Saab Gripen” and “orgy of corruption”.

I imagine that grade 2 was even more exciting, as little Tintswalo learned that sometimes words have two meanings, like “date”, or “bark”, or “quiet diplomacy”, which means doing diplomacy quietly but also means rubber-stamping a stolen election and then sitting on the Khampepe report for 12 years until the Mail & Guardian forces you to make it public.

Of course, change is relentless, and as Tintswalo entered high school it was in a country with a new cast of characters. Yes, there was the happy childhood nostalgia of Thabo Mbeki watching Robert Mugabe steal another election, and explaining how letting 300,000 South Africans die of HIV/Aids was antiracist; but now there was also Julius Malema, the new head of the ANC Youth League, a position once held by Nelson Mandela, explaining that Jacob Zuma couldn’t have raped “Kwezi” because she’d stayed for breakfast and clearly “had a nice time”.

Ramaphosa didn’t tell us what Tintswalo thought of the ANC Women’s League dancing outside Zuma’s trial, or of the revelation that Zuma was building himself a compound at taxpayers’ expense.

He certainly didn’t tell us what Tintswalo thought of the horror unleashed at Marikana just as she was preparing for her matric exams.

But he did tell us that her next step was to register and study at a TVET college, presumably because not everybody can be like Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, a defence minister who watched the Guptas land at Waterkloof airforce base that same year, didn’t resign, wasn’t fired, kept her job for another nine years, and is now the speaker of the National Assembly. No, when Tintswalo saw newspaper posters on her way to college she knew that in the real world people have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

A good student, Tintswalo graduated the same year Zuma appointed Des van Rooyen finance minister, and got something increasingly rare in SA: a job. After that? In 2019 Ramaphosa told her to “watch this space” and, like the rest of us, she’s watched nothing but space since then. It’s possible she’s stayed in the decent, BEE-backed job Ramaphosa outlined. It’s possible she’s lost it, and four others, as one business after another was crushed by the load-shedding that was born four years after she was.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter, because Tintswalo isn’t real. She is nobody, conjured up by a nothingburger of a president in defence of a party that simply isn’t there any more. The only stories that matter now are the ones inside the heads of ANC voters and nonvoters and whether those old stories still satisfy them, or whether it’s time to close the book once and for all.

HAVING BREATHED LIFE INTO TINTSWALO, DR FRANKENWHINE PROMPTLY ABANDONED HIS CREATION

TINTSWALO … CONJURED UP BY A NOTHINGBURGER OF A PRESIDENT IN DEFENCE OF A PARTY THAT ISN’T THERE