If Ramaphosa had any clout a phone call would have seen Mahlangu step down

There was a special kind of symbolism in this week’s discovery that Eskom’s debt is now more than the combined budgets for health and education in SA: given the choice between us being sick and stupid or the Bhutibond continuing to gorge on money, the party has opted for gluttony.

Actually, that’s not really true. It is unfair to political parties to describe the ANC as a party. Because, of course, it isn’t one. Instead it is a corruption machine, rough and crass and roaring, that grinds away at our country and our psyche day and night, extracting wealth wherever it finds it to buy loyalty and power and silence. It eats people and potential and hope, and shits out ruination and division.

Still, I know that some people still believe that the ANC is a party. I don’t want to be unkind to these people by suggesting that their heads contain nothing but a soup of cobwebs floating in arse-dribble. Perhaps they are just very naive, or don’t have access to newspapers, or live in a cave, on the moon, in the 12th century.

But after Monday, even the most, um, naive, of those people must surely be feeling the first stirrings of doubt. Because Monday was the day that Qedani Mahlangu (the lethally incompetent official who oversaw the deaths of over 140 mentally ill people in the Life Esidimeni scandal) was voted onto the ANC’s executive committee in Gauteng.

Read Eaton's full column on Times Select