TICKS ON THE BODY POLITIC

One need look no further than our politicians’ vacuous responses to the final Zondo commission report to see why our democracy is a tad dilapidated

What are politicians for? This is meant to be a serious question. I know the temptation is to assume it’s rhetorical, and that the answer is something along the lines of, not much. And I know that our recent experience seems to indicate that they exist to function as useful idiots for powerful men, and the occasional powerful woman. Politicians are like the travelling salesmen sent out to cajole ordinary people into spending their hardearned capital on a vastly overpriced set of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Like the tricks of our politicians, these books allowed people the illusion of learning, without the power to deploy the actual knowledge. We could be forgiven for judging our politicians harshly, if you look at some of the choices they have made and consider how they have destroyed our country and our dreams. It’s as if they were given a bright and shiny new toy in 1994, and they broke it, and now all we have left to play with is the shabby, torn box that the dream came in.

You and I both know that the preceding sentences are intended as a metaphor, but it really does seem that the people who run our country, and who ran it into the ground, think SA is literally their toy.

As you’ve probably guessed, all this melancholy pontificating was brought on by the latest instalment of the Zondo report. Released last week, it’ sa damning indictment of how the ANC and former president Jacob Zuma stripped our country for their own profit. As South Africans, when we think about this appalling crime, we sometimes risk being dragged into the weeds of whataboutery by the agents of misinformation. So let’s work with the BBC’s objective description. “The damning findings of an inquiry laid bare the looting of billions of dollars from SA’s state coffers The mammoth inquiry into corruption during the presidency of Jacob Zuma revealed

how almost every arm of the state was suffocated and left bankrupt by leaders of the ANC, which has governed the country since the end of white-minority rule in 1994.”

Depressing stuff, and it doesn’t help that I’m writing this in the near dark, the only source of light a couple of flickering candles, themselves crying out to live on these pages as a tired metaphor for the dying hope brought to us courtesy of Eskom. Not the hope bit, the dying bit.

Who is going to fix our democracy? I know there are many answers. For instance, there are amazing people doing great things in charities, NGOs, communities and individually. But the results of their endeavours would be vastly improved if we had politicians who gave us some hope that they’re working from within the system to renovate the dilapidated democracy we’re inhabiting.

What are politicians for? Surely one of the answers must be that politicians are there to serve a synecdochical function.

Synecdoche is a very useful word, a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole. You’d think that we’d be able to use the word “politicians” to signify a democracy, in the way we can use “the White House” when we mean the US government. But it looks more likely that we now use the word politicians as a stand-in for corruption.

It shouldn’t be like this. We should be able to trust our politicians, albeit for a given value of trust, to at least care about keeping our democracy alive.

But how can we trust people who give every impression of being stupid? I say impression, rather than accusing them of just being stupid. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Let’s look at some responses to current events by politicians, and politically exposed people. Are the politicians saying these things pretending to be stupid, so as to avoid having to be honest? Are they actually stupid, as in they really think certain things based on their flawed understanding of what constitutes truth? Or have they just made the conscious decision to say stupid things because they think we’re stupid enough to simply believe them?

Take ANC chair Gwede Mantashe’s response to the Zondo commission’s finding that the ANC’s cadre deployment policy is unlawful and unconstitutional, for example.

According to News24, “Zondo said that if a party could decide appointments, it could abuse this power ‘to achieve ends which are not in the best interests of the country’, and that ‘the evidence has demonstrated that state capture has been facilitated by the appointment of pliant individuals to powerful positions in state entities. The essential danger remains that appointment processes which are conducted behind closed doors and outside the constitutionally and legally stipulated processes are open to abuse.’”

Mantashe’s response? He told News24 that in the absence of the cadre deployment policy, apartheid-era officials would still run the state. “Mantashe said without cadre deployment, the transformation of the public service since

1994 would never have been possible,” the website reports, “and [he] defended the deployment committee’s nod to

Gupta stooge Brian Molefe.”

I’m no expert on affirmative action, but I would have hoped it was intended to redress all that. It seems Mantashe thinks we’re stupid enough to think that appointing ANC stooges so you can steal from the state is the same thing as affirmative action.

The alt-right and the racists must be shivering in delight at this take.

And this is BS of the highest order: “What is unlawful should be that in 1994 every head of the department was white,” Mantashe said. “That is really what is unlawful, but [if] cadre deployment, which changed this situation, is now deemed unlawful, then I do not know what unlawful is.”

Yes. “I do not know what unlawful is” might be revealing a little more than Mantashe intended.

Picking out another bad take from the many, many we have to choose from: Edward Zuma, son of the state capture godfather, “said the family was disturbed by the report and has called for it to be taken on review”.

He also described the report, according to News24, “as ‘nonsensical’ and ‘cooked’ to purge those who were ‘aligned’ to his father”.

And, in a statement that possibly tells us more about the

Zuma family than he imagines,

“he said his father had conditioned them as a family to be able to deal with situations like this”.

I’ll bet he did, Eddie, I’ll bet he did.

Edward also advanced the strange defence that

“former president

[Thabo] Mbeki knew the Guptas, so why is it an issue when president Zuma knows the

Guptas? Since I was born my father has been crucified and he is still crucified.

This is because of people who are used by foreign agents.”

He seems to have missed the fact that Zuma is not being accused of knowing people, but of selling our country to them.

The consensus, achieved over centuries, seems to be that we need politicians. We need to outsource democracy’s quality control, and be confident that when we trundle it out during an election to give our input, it’ll be in as good a shape as possible.

But if politicians are just keeping democracy limping along so they can suck its blood like fat ticks, and drop off when they’re sated (not that they ever seem to be), then we really need to start squashing them. Not by squeezing them until they burst — urging people to violence is their way of distracting us from their crimes, and we wouldn’t want to become what we despise — but by plucking them from the body politic and

discarding them in the dirt.

If politicians are just keeping democracy limping along so they can suck its blood like fat ticks … then we really need to start squashing them