Amid a fog of deception, what if Malema is not lying?
Politicians lie. Except when they don’t, and the problem is that it is extremely hard to separate the truth from their falsehoods. SA’s politics is a swirling post-truth fog where nothing is quite what it seems.
Of course, everyone tells lies and more often than readily admitted. There are little white lies, such as the Easter Bunny, and bigger lies like telling a prospective employer that you are the perfect candidate for the job, with stacks of experience. People do misrepresent themselves, sometimes out of shame, sometimes for fun, sometimes to get laid.
Politicians, however, are in a league of their own. They actively and knowingly create a world of smoke and mirrors to hide their real political agendas.
A New Dawn? Please, the new Cabinet is basically the old Cabinet and the parliamentary benches are depressingly the same. Mining will be a sunrise industry? SA’s mineral reserves are declining and future mines will be highly mechanised.
Either Patricia de Lille is a crook or the DA’s old guard, probably headquartered in Stellenbosch, doesn’t want a coloured mayor. Who knows. As for De Lille, who went from the Pan Africanist Congress to the Independent Democrats to the DA ... shrug, who knows. What seems to be reasonably certain is the DA can’t, despite statements to the contrary, keep its own house and Premier Helen Zille in order.
Election manifestos declare that every social ill will be solved. They are filled with promises that crime will disappear, poverty will be eradicated, hospitals will function and jobs will fall like manna from heaven. These manifestos, however, belong in the bookstore’s fantasy section.
After the 2019 polls, gangsters will continue to sling tik, Eskom will roll over debt until the sun goes supernova and Bafana Bafana will lose — quite possibly to an under-nine team from Guam.
Society is complicated. The economy alone is a complex affair. The distribution of goods and services is a constant activity among millions of different economic actors.
The sheer scale of the economy is beyond human comprehension, which is why centrally planned economies fail. No group of planners in the ministry of production can hope to predict the needs and desires of millions of consumers.
To make sense of the capitalist economy, financial analysts simplify and condense the totality of economic life.
Growth happens when GDP increases. The JSE is a proxy for the overall state of the economy. Human beings are reduced to Homo economicus: rational, self-interested agents seeking to maximise utility and profit.
Like economists, politicians reduce societal complexity to simple narratives, often which have no basis in reality. While farm murders occur in a vast matrix of social forces and conditions, the political right simply states that there is a genocidal conspiracy to eradicate white people.
Where do these nefarious conspirators meet? How do they make and communicate their plans? Inconvenient questions that disrupt the narrative, so best not to ask and here’s a free Steve Hofmeyr CD.
ANC politicians tell us that the National Development Plan (NDP) is a viable road map to a better future: facts such as the NDP requires 5.4% GDP growth per annum but our current GDP growth is 1% don’t matter in their post-truth SA.
The DA is thrashing around for a fresh narrative now that the devil incarnate, aka Jacob Zuma, has exited the stage.
As for the EFF, if you fall down crossing the street, white monopoly capital is to blame.
The combination of lies and simple narratives has produced a weary but dangerous cynicism among the electorate. Except for glassy-eyed ideologues, most of the elecorate discount the utterances of politicians, trust in the Constitution to protect their rights and do what South Africans always do at election time: vote by race.
The grave danger is that politicians sometimes tell the truth. Listening to US President Donald Trump ramble on is an acid trip into an alternate universe: contradictory falsehoods describe a ugly and crude world where the only certainty is his ego. Yet, Trump occasionally plays it straight.
He said he was going to tear up trade agreements, abandon climate change mitigation and stop taxing the rich. Check on all three. As for the great wall to keep out the brown hordes hopped up on reefer and ready to rape, pillage and plunder white America, the only reason Trump hasn’t started building it is that Congress refuses to provide the cash.
Commander-in-chief Julius Malema wasn’t lying about expropriation of land without compensation. Given that rare instance of truth, he may also be telling the truth about the EFF’s desire to nationalise factories, mines and banks.
Malema may also believe in the EFF’s constitution, which states that the party’s aim is “the establishment of the dictatorship of the people”.
How will this be achieved? According to the EFF’s constitution, “through whatever revolutionary means possible”.
Or nationalisation and revolutionary government may be just more of Malema’s flip-flopping propaganda: one moment Zuma is worth killing for, the next he is the enemy.
In 2017, Port Elizabeth was fine under a white mayor. In 2018, Port Elizabeth is the centre of Aryan subjugation of the black majority.
Malema is proving to be something of a political genius; he manages to hide his true intentions while presenting the nation with easy but contradictory narratives.
Malema’s real agenda will only be known if he is granted political power.
Maybe he decides to loot the country.
Maybe he brings about a peaceful reorganisation, based on human rights and democracy, of a skewed economy. Maybe he goes down the dark and terrible path of other revolutionaries who have attempted — no matter the cost in blood — to establish a dictatorship of the people/proletariat/volk.
The catch is that we can’t ask Malema because any answer he’d give could be a lie.
The post-truth fog prevents us from making rational and informed decisions about his intentions: we have only guesses about the opaque.
One way out of this mess is to assume that Malema isn’t lying when he says that the EFF wants to establish a revolutionary government and a centrally planned economy.
The question for the next few election cycles then becomes: do we prefer democracy or dictatorship?