I know it’s hard, but this Christmas, try to find it in your tired heart to feel some pity for ANC stooges who are spending the festive season lying awake, sweating into their AK47-themed linen, worried sick that they’re going to draw the short straw to be the one who has to tell Ace Magashule to step down.
I know. Like I said, it’s hard. Where Magashule is involved, it feels much more appropriate to remind the party that it made its bed and now needs to lie in it.
This, however, would be unkind, not least because after the ANC made its bed it crapped in it, then tried to clean it with battery acid, then set fire to it to hide the mess and then tried to blame white monopoly capital. In other words, it’s very hard for the ANC to lie in the bed it’s made.
Also, it’s Christmas, which means in the spirit of goodwill and charity I’m going to try to put myself into the shoes of those wretched cadres on the national executive committee. Not literally, of course, because that would require me to put on a pair of size six Louboutins or crocodile-skin brogues that taper into ludicrous points. But still, I think it's important to see the world through the eyes of others.
And what a hellish view it is right now, as they wallow in the stomach-churning, underpants-soiling terror of having to the do the right thing for the first time in a decade.
Imagine the existential dread of being a senior party hack right now, knowing that the bravest thing you’ve ever done is make eye contact with Jessie Duarte over the tray of custard slices at the last lekgotla, and now you might be days away from knocking on Magashule’s door.
Yes, you’ve been around the block a few times, usually because the guy with the brown paper bag was late, and you’ve got some war wounds — your wrist has never quite been the same after those 10 years of rubber-stamping every whim of your god-king Jacob Zuma, but telling Ace Magashule to step down, well, that’s another matter entirely. I mean, if the guy’s bodyguards could make a national art treasure disappear, imagine what they could do to you.
Of course, whichever lickspittle steps into Magashule’s office will be carrying an arsenal of resolutions, minutes of meetings, transcripts of discussions, mandates, memos and legal opinions. You don’t take a knife to a gunfight.
But nothing in those bulging briefcases will save them from the knowledge that they have committed the ANC’s deadliest sin and violated the first and only rule of Extraction Club: they have tried to touch the untouchable.
And they will stagger away from that encounter, nauseous and disoriented, praying to Mammon and whichever other gods they worship that Magashule holds firm; that their wretched little demands are shredded that very afternoon; that this whole nasty business goes away so that everybody can get back to feasting on the remains of the South African taxpayer.
Because if Ace Magashule goes, then nobody is safe, and by next Christmas they might have to get a real job and nothing will ever be good again.
Thoughts and prayers, Comrades. Thoughts and prayers.
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