The Donald trumps The Raj

IF you’re breaking out into cold sweats and losing sleep over who will succeed Jacob Zuma as president in 2019, stop worrying and start living.

You’re better off than your US counterparts who appear perplexed that some megalomanical billionaire with an open chequebook and a mouth to match is topping the popularity stakes.

From the day I heard Donald Trump launch his Republican presidential nomination campaign with a bigoted burst of verbal diarrhoea, I realised he was an incarnation of some local political scoundrel I knew some years ago.

Then it dawned on me. Did you realise it’s hard to tell the difference between The Donald (as he’s popularly known in the US) and The Raj (as the late Amichand Rajbansi came to be known) – with their trademark mops, finger-jabbing speeches and empty promises?

Even in their personal lives, both had a roving eye for women at beauty pageants; they enjoyed more than a passing interest in wrestling; they had highly publicised marriages that ended in messy divorces; and both believed firmly in the adage there is no such thing as bad publicity.

The similarities extended to their political styles too. Never renowned for their intellectual skills, The Donald and The Raj became masters of the art of manipulating the media and tended to rely on what one US commentator refers to as “shapeless populism” to win support – the one using personal attacks and naked bigotry to sell his big American Dream while the other pushed the discredited tricameral system to market his big apartheid dream.

Both will be remembered for their shrewd survival skills. If The Raj ever felt his support slipping, he would just jump ship and, when once asked how he would survive an impending pitfall, famously replied: “I’ll double-cross that bridge when I get to it.”

The Donald survives basically because he is so outrageously pompous, he really believes he can say anything and get away with it.

But the malaise in American electoral politics doesn’t end with The Donald. When one looks at the potential candidates for next year’s poll, the possibility of perpetuating yet another dynasty at the Oval Office looks real.

If Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush win their party nominations, it will be the ninth time in 10 presidential elections that a Bush or a Clinton is on the ballot sheet, causing many Americans to ask whether the US is now bereft of plausible candidates.

The question South Africans should ask is whether this trend towards dynasty-building could happen in their country in 2019.

Did I hear someone say Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s waiting in the wings?

dennis.pather@telkomsa.net