There was a kind of steampunk elegance to Ace Magashule’s backdated letter, as the Mangaung Machiavelli tried his hand at analogue time-travel, absurdly by stylishly trying to go back in time to save his future.
It was a marvel, almost literally: Magashule was clearly plagiarising the plot of the last two Marvel movies. Well, the time-travel part, at least: the producers of those blockbusters knew better than to create a final showdown in which Iron Man and Thanos throw letters at each other and yell: “You’re suspended!” “No, YOU’RE suspended!”
Because that’s just a terrible, terrible plot, right? I mean, surely nobody could possibly find such a storyline compelling, let alone realistic?
Wrong. There are plenty of South Africans willing to suspend their disbelief and entertain the ludicrous idea that Magashule had somehow managed to trump President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday evening.
I saw two of them on Thursday morning.
The first was on Instagram, where an educated, wealthy, internet-savvy South African living abroad posted a video in which they asked someone to confirm whether Ramaphosa had, in fact, been axed, as if there was a 50/50 chance that it had really happened.
Ace Magashule is a desperate loser who tried to pull off one of the most brazen cons in South African history.
The other was at a coffee shop in a leafy, wealthy suburb, where they sat poring intently over the front page of the Cape Times, the headline of which read: “Defiant Magashule suspends Ramaphosa”.
That newspaper, of course, is one of Iqbal Survé’s pensioner-funded skid marks and has made no secret of its support for the Zupta faction. Even so, an extraordinary number of Capetonians who are of the Zuma-loathing, corruption-denouncing variety inexplicably continue to absorb its propaganda every morning over their cappuccinos, apparently without a single critical thought sounding the alarm.
Which is why Magashule did what he did.
Yes, on the one hand it was a shambolic retreat, a desperate effort to poison the wells and scorch the earth of the Ramaphosa camp. But Magashule has watched his fellow populists in the US, Brazil and Eastern Europe lobotomise public discourse and weaponise an already partisan media, and he understood that this was the moment to reach for the nuclear option of the modern political scoundrel with nothing left to lose: the biggest lie he could imagine.
It was laughably transparent. It was fantastically dim-witted. And hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of South Africans woke up on Thursday morning and wondered if it was true.
Ace Magashule is a desperate loser who tried to pull off one of the most brazen cons in South African history. That there is any uncertainty about that, and that some so-called newspapers are willing to spread that uncertainty in return for money or patronage, is a timely reminder that we are not safe from big lies peddled by small men.
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