Batten down the hatches

IT HAS been said that if South Africa was a doomsday clock, the time would be perennially at 11.55. Five minutes to the end of the world – not as we know it, but altogether. Some wags will tell you South Africa has been like that since Jan van Riebeeck first stepped ashore on April 6, 1652, setting off 350 years of calamities and crises.

The past few years haven’t been much better; with the exception of that brief halcyon moment of joy engendered by the Fifa World Cup, we have teetered from one crisis to the next. The year 2016, though, is shaping up to be one of the biggest, even after all the drama on our campuses.

Today, the DA heads to court to force the cabinet to disclose the rationale for withdrawing South Africa from the International Criminal Court; and we have the fallout from the ruling party’s whip in Parliament, Jackson Mthembu, throwing down the gauntlet to President Jacob Zuma as factions widen into chasms within the ANC. And against that backdrop is the revolt of the South African Council of Churches, which revealed yesterday how Zuma told them he wouldn’t repay the money even if he were jailed.

On Wednesday, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan will present his medium term budget policy statement, before preparing to appear in court the very next week on two spurious charges of fraud laid by the national director of public prosecutions, who volubly protests his institution’s political and prosecutorial independence, only for his actions to belie his every word.

In any other society, people would be packing for Perth, or at the very least Pofadder. In this country, though, we have the sea legs to weather any storm – even if we are “stress-testing” the constitution in ways its authors would never have imagined.

We would do well to remember this as the storm rages and we are buffeted by this deadly tempest.