Slurs, lies, fakery — Trump holds a mirror up to the ANC
SA’s ruling party is no stranger to fake news and the hunt for bogeymen — but if it fails to address the real economic issues, we face a dire future, writes Tony Leon
SOUTH Africa might or might not have committed itself to a nuclear deal with the Russians. Statements are issued, denials follow, the rumour mill grinds overtime.
Take your pick — fact, fiction, truth, or post-truth?
Welcome to 2017. The distinguishing line between reality and fantasy in global and local politics has been blurred, if not erased.
The day after the epoch-changing inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the most powerful country in the world, the new man picked a fight about facts that were demonstrably against him.
In short order, Trump, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, and senior counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, got into a brawl with the media over the size of the crowd at his swearing-in.
Even though side-by-side photos showed the masses gathered at Barack Obama’s inauguration were far greater than last Friday, as were the number of rides on the metro underground and the TV ratings, it did not matter.
Spicer said: “This is the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — and around the globe.”
In one statement both the infinitive and the truth were split. Doubling down on the lie, Conway offered a novel defence of the White House having provided “alternative facts”.
Then on Monday Trump, in his first meeting with congressional leaders, again repeated, without a shred of substantiation or a single fact, “alternative” or otherwise, that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because “three to five million people illegally voted”.
If the first four days of the new administration are any guide, be sure of this: the next four years will be very bumpy indeed for Americans and the world.
But if there is something rather bizarre about this path and the casual regard for the word and bond of the most important politician on the world stage, Trump offered a very clear insight into how he sees the world and how it must be shaped.
Long before his entry into politics, reflecting on his success in real estate and reality TV, he wrote in his memoir, The Art of the Deal: “I play to people’s fantasies. People might not always think big themselves, but they can still be excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts . . . I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
It is perhaps alarming to note the difference in Trump’s reach between when that was penned — he was a real estate developer and TV host at the time — and now, when he has command of the nuclear codes.
Because he rises to every slight and is offended when he doesn’t look big enough or the legitimacy of his election is questioned, Trump cannot accept the fact on which intelligence agencies are united: that the Russians hacked into his opponent’s campaign computers and used the contents to possibly tilt the election.
Of course, it is also entirely possible that his clearly below-par Democratic Party opponent might have lost anyway.
But before South Africans have an early dose of schadenfreude, or joy at the fact that it’s not only us who have an ethically compromised president to whom the truth might be a foreign object, a court case playing out this week in the High Court in Johannesburg pointed to another big difference.
The Russian hacking and the WikiLeaks distribution of e-mails from the Democratic national committee and Clinton campaign were ruthlessly efficient. But the details that emerged in court papers of a war room set up by the ANC appeared to owe more to the spirit of Groucho Marx than Karl.
This “dirty tricks” operation was, according to court papers, focused on “enhancing the ANC’s presence on social media, and disempowering its political rivals, the DA and EFF, by printing fake election posters, producing false articles and planting bogus callers to radio shows”. But in the words of the aggrieved public relations applicant, far from being a dark arts operation a la the Kremlin, it was a fiasco of monumental incompetence.
Of course the ANC denied any role in this, but this, too, is apparently an “alternative fact” as the party had already stumped up R1-million and paid it over for a contract “which did not exist”.
At least, without winning the popular vote, and with or without the aid of Russian hackers, Trump was astoundingly but legitimately elected as president.
In contrast, in August last year the ANC lost control of three major cities to the opposition, and its hapless war room — and the legal fight over paying for it — serves as a warning metaphor for the incompetence and perhaps even dishonesty of some of its administrations.
But now in the last year of the Jacob Zuma ANC presidency, a far bigger war, with equal disregard for facts, plays itself out.
Behind hidden hand and dragging feet, the undeclared candidates for the ANC leadership slug it out. They also embrace a Russian technique much in evidence in the US election, called kompromat, or “compromising materials”.
Before Trump himself was, apparently falsely, said to feature in Russian video footage taken on an old trip to Moscow, he dished up of kompromat on Clinton. This is what he stated at a rally in West Palm Beach on October 13: “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.”
Here at home the kompromat follows a similar pattern.
Two weeks ago, an anonymous Zuma backer (of either Jacob Zuma or his former wife) declared in City Press that Cyril Ramaphosa was a problem candidate “because he is in the pocket of the Jews”.
The rich irony, given the fact that every white ANC Rivonia triallist was Jewish, is less perhaps than the sinister imputation.
In the same news cycle, another non-contender — under the bizarre rituals of the party none shall proclaim a candidacy — is said to have a mortal disease.
Then, to try to establish a sort of moral equivalence between the most infamous family in Saxonwold and the most famous name in Stellenbosch, the Ruperts are falsely linked to a benefit from the refloated Absa lifeboat.
Zuma himself rails against “white monopoly capital”, and his Gupta friends state on affidavit that our imperilled finance minister turned a roomful of business leaders against them to “clip their wings”.
Speaking from Davos, where he helped Team South Africa abroad while the team at home was undermining every advantage we have, one of those bankers, Stephen Koseff of Investec, made an essential point.
Describing himself as “a capitalist with a social conscience”, he said: “We can’t have 27% unemployment, no country has 27% unemployment. Maybe Zimbabwe does. I don’t know if people there are employed at all.”
Any leader here needs to deal with this. As we burden our country with a R2-trillion debt overload, we now have only 86 people in employment for every 100 social grant recipients, all paid for by a tax base of effectively one million people.
Without the 5% GDP growth promised by the National Development Plan, instead of the dismal sub-1% growth misery of current times, everything else is superfluous. Maybe the non-declared candidates for the ANC and national presidency should address this key challenge.
Never mind Russian nuclear plants which might or might not have been ordered.
Our inability, or unwillingness, to address the real economic challenges staring us in the face is the real nuclear option of mutually assured destruction.
Leon is a former leader of the opposition and former South African ambassador to Argentina
Without the 5% GDP growth promised by the NDP, everything else is superfluous
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