Living on the never-never in Liberationland
His testimony was panned for its platitudes and ludicrous revisionist history, but Cyril Ramaphosa was never supposed to reveal any great truths at the Zondo commission.
Which is why it was so startling when he told us that the ANC has the moral right and duty to rule SA forever, badly.
Those weren’t his words, exactly, but they were the clear subtext as the president told the commission on Friday that the ANC remained first and foremost a liberation movement.
Perhaps that’s why his alarmingly honest statement was largely ignored by most of the analysis at the weekend.
Being told that the ANC is still a liberation movement, dedicated to the salvation of the oppressed, is like being told by the SABC to watch Survivor season 35: all one can do is marvel very briefly that there are still people in the world who are interested in this inane bulldust.
Because, of course, Ramaphosa’s claim is nonsense.
I don’t know the academic definition of a liberation movement, but I’m not sure you still get to call yourself a freedom fighter when you’ve controlled a Treasury and an air force for 27 years, and the last time you shoved your fist in the air with any real conviction was when you were trying to get your arm through the sleeve of a Versace gown.
Ramaphosa, however, had a typically silky counterargument.
Racism, sexism and poverty still exist, he explained.
Therefore the liberation of SA will not be complete as long as these scourges remain.
If you believe in the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes in which all outcomes are happening simultaneously, then it is definitely possible that, at least in two or three of those universes, the ANC might be stamping out the above-mentioned scourges.
In this universe, however, the ANC can barely stamp out a cigarette butt without setting itself on fire, and then accusing the paramedics of racism and selling the ambulance for a handful of shiny buttons.
And even if the party performed a trans-dimensional miracle and ended racism, sexism and poverty tomorrow, it seems fairly obvious that new blights will emerge, such as inequality and violence wrought by environmental collapse or access to diminishing resources.
In short, there will always be something we will have to be “liberated” from.
Which means, by Ramaphosa’s definition, our liberation will be endless.
As a form of government, it will also be fantastically incompetent, and not just because it is haunted by people who, as Ramaphosa revealed, are only now starting to grapple with the notion that a public service should be staffed by professionals rather than with the slack-jawed nephews of party yes-men.
(Can you imagine the excitement when they discover the existence of fax machines?)
No, the real clue to our problem is in the name.
Ramaphosa didn’t give us the opportunity to try to rebrand the ANC as a “liberation-before-transition-into-dull-but-efficient-technocracy movement”.
He told us that, instead of a state and a bureaucracy, we get an organisation carefully designed to overthrow the former and dismantle the latter.
Being led by a liberation movement rather than by a government comes with many obvious dangers, not least to our sanity, as we keep vainly expecting a rusty AK-47 to transform into a kind and excellent kindergarten teacher.
Such movements are often deeply corrupt, with accountancy considered counter-revolutionary.
This means they fall foul of the judiciary, which then also needs to be “liberated”.
But perhaps most destructive of all is that a liberation movement is, by definition, provisional, locking the country it runs into an endless form of administrative triage as it moonlights in governance on the fly.
For years pundits have been bewailing the fact that our ruling elite puts the ANC ahead of the constitution and seems entirely uninterested in doing the sort of maintenance required by a technocratic modern state.
On Friday, Ramaphosa explained why.
If you believe that liberation is still under way, then at least on some level you must believe the country you wish to create and govern has not yet come into existence.
A constitution for such a proto-place would be little more than an anaemic intellectual exercise, utterly overshadowed by the roaring, churning, gloriously alive stomach that is the ANC.
As for maintenance, well, if the promised land is still over the next mountain, why would you plough and plant in the valley in which you find yourself?
Perhaps it was just rhetoric on Ramaphosa’s part, playing to the champagne socialists who get off on the idea of themselves as revolutionaries. But words have meaning. And when the president swears to tell the truth and tells a judge that we are run by a liberation movement rather than a government, perhaps we should listen to what he’s telling us.