TOM EATON | Oh, joy! Little RET has arrived and daddy Carl is so proud

When Carl Niehaus sent out an “URGENT MEDIA ALERT” on Thursday, I assumed he was announcing the passing of his third father, or perhaps his fourth. But it wasn’t another bereavement. It was the opposite: the announcement of the birth of the ANC’s very own bonny, bouncing vampire Mini-Me, sucking its cute little thumb as it sniffs out its mother’s carotid artery.

Of course, proud stepdad Carl didn’t use those exact words. Instead, he explained that the media were being invited to listen to a “report on the deliberations and decisions of the first strategic meeting of the RET National Operations Committee”.

In case you are one of the 59,999,950 South Africans who don’t know what the RET National Operations Committee is, Carl added a useful primer at the bottom of the press release, explaining that its purpose is to “coordinate the activities of those ANC members who support Radical Economic Transformation”.

This was news to me, as I thought the activities of the RET crowd were coordinated by whichever breeze was blowing the banknotes scattered by its latest benefactors.

But I don’t want semantics to get in the way of what is a truly momentous event in the raucous unravelling of the ANC. Any birth is magical, even the birth of a parasitic homunculus that wants to destroy the party and then the country, and I think congratulations are in order. Regardless of your faction, all of you glorious revolutionaries must be so, so proud.

Any birth is magical, even the birth of a parasitic homunculus that wants to destroy the party and then the country, and I think congratulations are in order.

Certainly, the little monster is already proving to be quite precocious. Just hours after its existence was made public, it was demonstrating cynical opportunism well beyond its tender years by co-opting the Fees Must Fall march near Wits, marching in “solidarity” with the same students whose lecturers were derided as “clever blacks” by former president Jacob Zuma and whose degrees will only be useful as kindling if RET ever happens.

Kids really do grow up so fast, don’t they?

Before we get too swept up by the youngsters, however, I would like to close with a word of comfort to the SA Communist Party, which, until today, has been the ANC’s oldest and favourite parasite.

Comrades: Mommy and Daddy still love you very, very much. Well, not you as much as the veneer of ideological sophistication you offer them, so they can go to sex clubs with hedge fund managers and claim they’re only here because they’re researching a book about poverty alleviation.

But they do care very deeply for you. It’s just that little RET has arrived and, well, he’s a difficult baby, so Mommy and Daddy are going to have to spend quite a lot of time understanding what his screams mean and making sure he doesn’t suffocate them in their sleep, alright?

So hang in there, comrades. Oh, and you might want to start sleeping with one eye open.