All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others GEORGE ORWELL Author,

Animal Farm

WITH its customary cack-handed timing, Eskom on Thursday – after days and nights of burdensome load shedding – suspended the pain. Whoop dee doo!

It’s the second year that Eskom has avoided blackouts on this particular day. News24 reports that the government paid Eskom R7million-R10m an hour to suspend cuts on this “special day”.

This meant that for the second year in a row the entire nation lacked a plausible excuse to avoid the torture of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s annual version of Scheherazade’s flights of fantasy, otherwise known as the State of the Nation Address. The Arabian storytelling fabulist’s tall tales lasted a mesmerising 1001 nights. Our president’s fiction only felt that long.

When one runs Sona through the text-analysis program Grammarly, aside from the usual carping about the writer having failed to follow American conventions on language use, the verdict was positive.

The program computes that Sona would take 30 minutes and 12 seconds to read and 58 minutes and 5 seconds to speak. In reality, it took Ramaphosa 81 minutes, what with presidential gravitas and all.

Sona’s content was deemed “very engaging” and the tone was “just right”, although the speech did lack

“a bit” in clarity.

Grammarly doesn’t have a BSD filter, but I do. My bullshit detector gave readings in the same red-light range as all the other Ramaphosa Sonas we’ve endured.

By the time you read this, the media will have dissected every nuance, decried every broken promise from Sona 2020, and debunked every outrageous prediction of what’s to come. Suffice it to say, if you expected f***-all, you wouldn’t be disappointed, although there was the usual intellectual frippery that’s hauled out to titivate such showcase occasions.

In similar literary vein, for the second time in a Sona, the president’s speechwriters have whipped hard his favourite botanical metaphor, that of the hardy Protea. The Protea, Ramaphosa points out, not only survives fire but demands it – a regular Phoenix-like death and resurrection every decade or so is essential for the species to thrive.

The comparison makes perfect sense, of course. The reason why the government is deliberately screwing up the economy is so a new, vibrant, command-council version can emerge from the ashes. Pass the matches, comrade.

Ramaphosa has become omnipresent on television, ladling out wholesome dollops of reassurance and inspiration. This is his fifth Sona in three years – the first was in 2018 and because of the 2019 general election there were two that year – since the pandemic he has appeared about once a month.

It’s all very well for Ramaphosa to assure the nation that Eskom will be fixed, government spending will be cut, corruption will be curbed, violent crime controlled, and broadband rolled out, but all these promises have been made by him before. While nations need to have goals, these goals need to be credible.

There’s no need for Grammarly’s artificial intelligence or the tens of thousands of words that the commentariat will devote to dissecting Sona, to assess its credibility. Simply view it through a single filter, the response of two highranking party members to the Zondo commission into state capture.

Reacting to former president Jacob Zuma’s brazen refusal to obey a Constitutional Court order to appear before the commission, ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule was quick to signal to Zuma where the party stood. “Why should we call him into order when he’s done nothing wrong?”

And, this week, deputy secretarygeneral Jessie Duarte expanded upon the party’s understanding of democratic constitutionalism in an article. It was most worrying, she wrote, that “democratic centralism is now the subject of a commission led by a judge who, with respect, practises his craft based on the narrow parameters of existing laws”.

There are deep cleavages in the ANC and, so far, Cyril’s “social compacting” has not bridged them. Until that internal power struggle is resolved, it’s impossible for Sona promises to be anything but hot air.

In the meanwhile, given the Eskom bill of R7m-R10m per hour to keep the telly going, the president needs to talk faster.