Cheers to the lesson

Idid everything I could to avoid it, short of pouring superglue into my eyes. I knew my evening would be ruined by reading the ANC’s election manifesto. As much as I enjoy well-written fiction, this wasn’t on my list. Quite frankly, I’d sooner read the bible.

At least there are talking snakes and rivers of blood and a fair amount of begetting. I bet there’s none of that in the manifesto. Or maybe there is. Let me have a look. First, a fortifying drink. Right. I’m going in. Pray for me. A warning should flash up when you type “ANC election manifesto” into Google.

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

The first thing I see is a photo of our fearful leader, Comrade President Cyril Ramaphosa the First. And hopefully the last. He looks absolutely delighted. Happier than I’ve ever seen him. I bet the picture was taken at the very moment he learned that a trusted lieutenant had found someone in Dubai who was prepared, for a modest fee, to admit to having dropped off half a million dollars at Phala Phala for a squadron of buffaloes that he never really wanted in the first place.

Above his head, like a portentous sword of Damocles, is the ANC logo of a spear, shield and pizza. We are encouraged to vote for the ANC. “Let’s do more, together.” More what, exactly? Cynics might say crime. But that’s giving them too much credit. Any organisation that wants to do more crime, the mafia, for instance, has to be supremely organised. There has to be discipline in the ranks. Everyone must know their role. You’d be hard-pressed to find a criminal organisation more disorganised and undisciplined than the ANC. Also, the mafia has a code of honour. The ANC has no honour and no code. Codes are complicated and require the capacity to remember what they are. The ANC has forgotten who they are meant to be.

It would be more honest if the slogan read, “Let’s do something, together.”

Ever since Mandela and, at a push, Mbeki, the party has been working off a very low base when it comes to doing stuff of any consequence. Maybe that’s the pizza in their logo. Thin base.

For how much longer can they claim credit for bringing water and electricity to the masses when they have single-handedly caused that very supply of water and electricity to become increasingly erratic over the years? Perhaps the manifesto has answers.

It starts with a foreword. This time, the photo has Ramaphosa not looking into camera and not smiling. He wants to be taken seriously and yet, being a gentleman, would rather not look us in the eye while selling us a pack of rancid porky pies.

The foreword is titled, “A Message to South Africans”. A triggering phrase, if ever there was one. Let me refresh my glass. It takes a pandemic for Ramaphosa to make an appearance on national television, so when we hear that he has a message for us, our first instinct is to rush out and buy open-toed shoes and rotisserie chickens.

“Our country has come a long way,” quoth he. Columbus, Cortéz and Van Riebeeck also came a long way and it ended badly for the locals every single time. But yes, South Africa has come a long way. Apartheid sucked. And I’m not just saying that because of the trouble I had scoring good weed in a whites-only suburb.

If it weren’t for the ANC, there’s a chance teenagers in Durban North might still be sneaking into someone’s backyard late at night and knocking softly on Themba’s kaya door.

But to say that your party has been at the “forefront of a movement to construct a new South Africa” is to take shamelessness to an entirely new level. A “new South Africa” is a phrase so brutalised by the passage of time that I can’t even remember who coined it. The ANC saying it’s in the process of building a new South Africa reminds me of the Christmas I got a Lego set and my engineer father shouted at me for two days because I was unable to construct even a basic house. I like to think there weren’t enough pieces for the property I had in mind.

Maybe that’s the ANC’s excuse. They lost too many of their pieces. Or, like me, couldn’t work out how things fit together.

Being a decent man, deep down, and perhaps having got wind that the country is not populated entirely by drooling idiots, Ramaphosa admitted that “we still have more hills to climb”. For an indolent nation, this is a terrible thing to hear. Nobody likes climbing hills. There’s always a way around them. And the ANC knows this better than most.

For the past 30 years, they’ve been skirting the hills while encouraging us to climb them. We’re all still heading for base camp, sweating and cursing, while the leadership waltzes through the valleys and dales singing “Hi-ho hi-ho it’s not off to work we go”.

“We learn from the past,” said the man we once foolishly thought would save us. That couldn’t have been written with a straight face. Not that he would’ve written it. He has people to do this sort of thing for him. But he would have read it. And, I imagine, chortled. Or even fallen from his chair clutching his well-fed belly.

The ANC learns from the past in the same way that a hangover teaches us to never drink again.

“We will focus on six priorities...” That’s it? Please. I have six priorities every day. Okay, one of them is to wake up, but still.

Then things took a dark and paranoid turn. “There are forces that seek to use this election to undo the progress of democracy.” If he’s talking about the EFF and Jacob Zuma’s cowboys, he might have a point. But even then, all they’re doing is using the election to get into power. Just like every other party. What they do once they win is entirely up to them. That’s the essence of democracy, right? Majority rule. It’s what the ANC fought for.

Oh, look. I never got around to the actual manifesto. Maybe next time.

Van Riebeeck also came a long way and it ended badly for the locals