Fear not, ANC cadres, NDZ’s shocking heresy is just silly

Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is on a roll.

Like a prophet tasked with an urgent revelation, she seems to be everywhere, speaking and speaking and speaking, softly but with the supreme confidence that comes from being untouched by worldly concerns, preaching her vision of ecstatic, allembracing absurdity.

On the weekend, for example, she gave us the Parable of the Gangster Who Was Actually Sort Of A Nation Builder.

The economic damage being done by the state’s ban on tobacco, Dlamini-Zuma revealed through mystical, Byzantine court papers, was partially being alleviated by the economic contribution of the illegal cigarette trade.

It was an exciting idea, especially for criminals, and opened up an entirely new line of argument for defence lawyers.

(“Your honour, by blowing up that ATM my client was merely doing his patriotic duty to try to keep glass fitters, firefighters, police and ATM maintenance teams employed during this difficult time.”)

But instead of lingering on it for a few days, and perhaps explaining why it is much, much easier for a tobacco smuggler to get into heaven than for a Camel to pass through the lips of a South African smoker, she packed up her wagon train and moved on to something called the OR Tambo School of Leadership.

I can’t tell you very much about this ANC finishing school in Houghton except that its stationary costs must be incredibly low.

After all, what the modern ANC knows about leadership you can fit on a Post-it.

What I can tell you, however, is that it offers aspiring cadres 13 “strategic courses”.

In Course 4, for example, you can embrace hard-core academic rigour by having ANC-appointed apparatchiks in an ANC school teach you about the ANC.

Gaudeamus igitur! Once you’ve covered the really important stuff, you can dabble in obscure sideshows like Course 12, or “Introduction to the South African Constitution”.

Those who push through to the very end will meet Course 13: “Revolutionary Morality, Ethics and Culture.” This has something to do with Marxism, but don’t worry if it all sounds a bit higher grade: the goal of this course, as stated on the school’s website, is as follows.

“By the end of the module, participants should be able to:

Identify revolutionary morality, ethics and culture.” That’s it. There is no 2. Right, scholars, your time starts now. Can you identify any of the words you’ve heard this semester? Yes?

And ... pens down! Well done, here’s your diploma.

It was into this network of crackling synapses that Dlamini-Zuma rolled on Sunday with an idea so shocking and new that it must have sounded like heresy, namely, that when the ANC places people in jobs at municipalities, those people should be able to do the jobs they’ve been handed.

A terrible silence must have descended over the Leadership School, broken only by the percussive pink of a golf ball being hit across the nearby Houghton Golf Club.

Then, pandemonium, as cadres clawed at their faces or fell screaming to the floor.

It must have been like watching Martin Luther nail his 95 theses to the church door, if Martin Luther had been a depressed auditor called Gary and his 95 theses had been two slices of ham he’d accidentally flicked across the office kitchen and they’d briefly stuck to the fridge door before sliding onto the floor.

Fortunately a journalist from The Citizen was present, so we know that Dlamini-Zuma stood tall and hammered on.

“We need a new attitude on how to deploy our members to the local sphere of government,” she said.

“Cadre deployment is good but it must be done properly.”

Now, I would argue that cadre deployment has, in fact, been done properly.

The little piles of ash that were once municipal ledgers, and the slowly cooling craters that were SOEs, are ample proof of how extensively and thoroughly cadre deployment has been done to SA.

But when she added that “all those deployed must possess that ’the s where required things skills got and really capacity to do the job”, well, silly.

Because it’s a contradiction in terms.

Any of “our members” who are identified as “cadres” fit for “deployment” are, by definition, unable to do the job of a professional bureaucrat.

This is because they are political creations, designed, like the poor souls labouring through those 13 “courses”, to be useful to the party rather than the country.

If they have a skill, it is for advancement, not administration. If they have an affinity for systems and service, they are the systems of hierarchy and the service of power.

But the main problem is that they can’t be deployed because they already have jobs. They’re professional cadres. And they’re doing their job exactly how Dlamini-Zuma and her government taught them to do it.