Can honest constitutional democracy deliver hope?
SOMETIMES, the most frightening dangers lurk in the silence. Last week, a headline: “Zuma changes tune form ‘Umshini Wami’ to ‘Sengimanxebanxeba’.” Fred Khumalo, on Sowetan Live, wrote of former president Jacob Zuma’s supporters, outside court: “They sang, they danced, they chanted slogans and punched the air with angry fists.”
The new song, “Sengimanxebanxeba”, loosely translated, “speaks of a man whose body is crisscrossed with gaping wounds and horrific gashes; he is bleeding profusely from wounds inflicted by people he thought were his friends and brothers”.
“That’s Msholozi’s forte; he knows how to play the victim. He is a master at pulling the heart strings of ordinary folk… When he tells the masses he is bleeding… the masses can relate. They are, after all, unemployed and poor… The masses take up the song… their faces mirroring the pain they are feeling. Like Zuma, they are bleeding, their bodies are screaming out in agony from deep wounds visited upon them by those in power,” Khumalo writes (abbreviated).
If the author’s right, there’s an elephant in the room. A massive, terrifying one.
If Zuma remains the “saviour” – hung high, bleeding, crucified by the state – then their belief in their populist folk hero trumps their belief in the entire constitutional democratic collective. And probably its supposedly legitimate leaders too.
From the ground level, right up to the top. Councillors, ward committees, sub-councils, mayors, local and district municipalities, the dozen provincial departments, two dozen national departments and their ministers, and the entire parastatal network around them.
It means Zuma’s “crocodile tears” hold more water, for some, than the entire state delivery system – which the people voted for, to help improve their lives.
That loss of faith is a vast vacuum – and vacuums are dangerous spaces.
Fertile ground for demagogues, martyrs and psychopaths.
Thirty years ago, the mainstream press learnt about dangerous irrelevance the hard way.
I recall sitting in a newspaper boardroom. A respected Irish newspaperman was addressing management on broadsheet newspapers’ increasing irrelevance.
He said: “As you know, the tabloids and ‘red tops’ in the UK are also known as ‘the popular press’.
“Why wouldn’t you want to be popular press, too?” he asked.
“Don’t you realise what the opposite of ‘popular’ is? “Unpopular.” Touche. Sometimes, being unpopular is crucial. But always?
The only counter to reckless, dishonest populism is compelling, invigorating, relentless relevance by legitimate government.
And if the constitutional democratic state can’t offer that, then maybe it’s understandable for Zuma’s followers to back their rebel “messiah on the cross” instead.