Throw us under the bus too, we’re dying anyway
Imagine the ANC’S envy as it watched Britain’s governing party throw Liz Truss under the bus last week, grudgingly admiring a country that doesn’t have a taxi mafia and therefore still has buses to throw people under, and wondering if Cyril Ramaphosa could instead be thrown under the dumpster in which the party grows its future leaders.
Of course, the president isn’t planning to take his dumping lying down, and on Sunday tried to seize back the initiative by going on TV and insulting our intelligence.
“Few could have imagined that from among the leadership of our public institutions, from within our business circles, from among our public representatives and public servants, would emerge a network of criminal intent,” said the man who told the New York Times in 1996 that the ANC was “highly conscious of the damage that corruption does to a party and a country”, and whose party and alliance partners have spent the last century denouncing the inherent untrustworthiness of business people.
“Few could have imagined that this group of people would infiltrate key departments, state-owned companies, private companies, law enforcement bodies and security services to loot vast amounts of public funds; that they would weaken and destroy state institutions and thus undermine the capacity of the state,” continued the man who defends a policy of parachuting people into those same key departments, state-owned companies, law enforcement bodies and security services, based not on their ability or skill but on their loyalty, family connections or patronage networks.
To be fair, when Ramaphosa tells us there are 165 people facing charges involving state capture, I don’t think it’s all lies. I can believe that his inquisitors are about to descend like the angel of death, or at least the cherubs of severe inconvenience, onto that cohort of midlevel expendables who are cunning enough to have secured a seat at the trough but unlucky enough to be in the wrong clique or just too junior to be worth saving. The show trials are going to be a blast.
The untouchables, though, are going nowhere. And for some, not even impending death seems to be a hindrance.
At the weekend Jacob Zuma rebranded himself as Schrödinger’s Candidate, ready to accept the nomination for another five-year stint as president while simultaneously being terminally ill, with so little time left that he needed to be medically paroled from a prison sentence that would have ended earlier this month.
You might wonder why journalists are still flocking to record Zuma’s limited, self-pitying musings on things, but in this instance I’m glad the stenographers were there because it allowed him to remind us of how democratic institutions act as a bulwark against naked ambition. It happened when he was asked, for some inexplicable reason, whether he would be available for another term in office.
That, Zuma, replied, would depend “on the people of SA”, before he added: “If it depended on me, I would have been president forever, but it doesn’t work that way.” As far as I know this is the first time in SA history that a politician has openly admitted to wanting to be ruler for life while conceding, somewhat ruefully, that the only reason he isn’t is because democratic institutions exist.
And he wasn’t the wildest act in town. That honour belonged to Allan Boesak, who wrote an opinion piece in the Sunday Times comparing Ramaphosa to PW Botha, mainly because Boesak and Lindiwe Sisulu hadn’t been allowed to visit convicted fraudster John Block in a Northern Cape prison.
According to Boesak, being prevented from ministering to Block was a “direct challenge to the authority of God” and, I would imagine, a bit of an existential crisis for a believer watching the omnipotent creator of all things being thwarted by a correctional services official armed with nothing but a clipboard.
Boesak went on to invoke arrogant cabinets, crumbling pariah states, a black majority trapped in poverty, and an arbitrary justice system.
The more he wrote though, the more it became clear that he was, perhaps, half right. In one particular aspect Ramaphosa is very much like an apartheid president. Just not PW Botha.
No, to listen to the pearlclutching and finger-pointing of the ANC and its allies is to hear, replicated with bizarre faithfulness, the cry of many white verkramptes in the 1990s, denouncing another man entirely: FW de Klerk.
Indeed, in some respects the accusations of the radical economic transformation lobby are almost indistinguishable from something you might hear from someone pausing to gaze at the old SA flag draped on the door of his end-times, whitesonly bunker; a bitter fantasy in which everything was working perfectly until that traitor came along, that puppet of foreign liberal capital, and now everything is broken and a once-great country is a mess.
Neither can see that the whole thing was hollowed out years earlier, by greed and stupidity, and was always going to collapse. And neither can admit that the object of their hatred is just the guy, complicit as the rest, who was left holding the baby when the inevitable happened.