The Big Read: What a mess, Stalwarts and all

30 May 2017 - 09:38 By tom eaton
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IMPOSSIBLE TO DISMOUNT: Despite the people's pleas, the president's not about to ride off into the sunset.
IMPOSSIBLE TO DISMOUNT: Despite the people's pleas, the president's not about to ride off into the sunset.
Image: GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP

Jacob Zuma, the nation's media announced, had "survived" the meeting with the National Executive Committee, which was rather like announcing that a medieval king had survived his morning blowjob.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that Zuma isn't taking a lot of flak right now. According to insiders at the NEC meeting, anxiously warming the massage oil between their hands, 45 of the 106 attendees asked Zuma to step down. Hell, that means that only 57% of the ruling party publicly endorses the gutting of the republic for personal gain.

Then there's the extraordinary claim in the so-called Gupta e-mails (presumably leaked to the Sunday papers by one of those malcontents to coincide with the NEC meeting) that the Zuma clan is trying to relocate to Dubai.

At first glance this looks like some sort of escape plan, a bit like the end of The Sound of Music where the Von Trapps skedaddle over the Alps. Indeed, it's easy to imagine the Zuma Family Singers all lined up on the national stage, warbling a medley of our favourite hits from that film - The Lonely Gupta-turd; How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Free Press?; My Favourite Indians; Sell Every Mountain - before rolling the car silently down the highway to Waterkloof Air Base.

I'm not so sure, however, that a move to Dubai would necessarily be about fleeing. One of the people named in the weekend's tranche of e-mails was Mzwanele Manyi, who once declared that there was an "oversupply" of coloured people in the Western Cape. If Mr Manyi is in any way connected to the Zumas or the Guptas, it's possible he noticed a severe shortage of Zulus in Dubai and the whole thing is just another of his social engineering schemes.

So yes, there have been lots of hard words - Daddy even had to get a bit shouty with the NEC, telling them that if they said naughty phrases like "step down" again he would send them to their rooms without any kickbacks - but I don't think anybody actually believes that Zuma is about to disappear. He may not be Nominal President for much longer (our actual president, is, of course, whichever Gupta feels like handling the South Africa account that day), but it is now accepted dogma that his plan is long-range, long-term control over the country via remote control.

All of which brings us, rather confusingly, to the ANC Stalwarts. You've probably read one of their faintly heroic ejaculations about pulling the country back from the brink and how they don't agree with the direction we're going.

What they mean, of course, is that they are feeling terribly uncomfortable. Fighting for a good spot at the trough is hard enough at the best of times, but imagine trying to position yourself ahead of Zuma's transformation into a digital, holographic ruler. Whose back are you going to massage now? Or will it boil down to who sends the best emojis?

Drowning people will cling to anything, so it's not surprising that the Stalwarts are gaining some traction. Already, some folks are convincing themselves that the apparatchiks who put Zuma in power and kept him there are actually ardent democrats just waiting to explode into a rainbow of good governance. "Yes, it looked like she was asleep in parliament but she was actually resting her mind ahead of the great struggle to take back the country from, er, herself."

Alas, they're going to sink. I know that not everyone in government is corrupt. Some of them are merely incompetent. Others are paralysed, trapped in a web of conflicts and contradictory promises they've made to their backers. But when I consider life after Zuma, I remember the words of Cyril Ramaphosa, our next president.

"The ANC is pained immensely by stories of corruption," he told the New York Times. "We are highly conscious of the damage that corruption does to a party and a country."

He said those words in 1996. Twenty-fucking-one years ago. The context? Damage control around Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma's Sarafina 2 corruption debacle. And you tell me this lot can change?

We don't know if there is leadership that can do right by the country. Certainly many people are becoming frustrated with the media's focus on Zuma: why, they ask, do we keep saying what we don't want rather than outlining what we do?

I understand that question, but right now it's like marching up to a paramedic who is holding someone's intestines in, and saying: "Excuse me, but I'm very concerned that you're not addressing when this person will go back to work."

When you're learning how to identify feelings, you start with the not-feelings: what a thing doesn't feel like. We're clearly unskilled at electing good governments, so, as we begin to grope our way towards a better alternative, I think it's OK to focus on what we don't want; to say that we don't want this, or the people who allowed this to happen.

The next step? Education. Better safeguards. Perhaps a paragraph added to the constitution explicitly stating that the country probably shouldn't be run via e-mail from abroad.

We'll slowly clarify what we want. But it's not this.

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