In the opening act of the maritime drama Captain Philips, two desperate men in the middle of nowhere try to convince each other that they’re much more powerful than they look.
The one is the eponymous Phillips, who is watching a boatload of Somali pirates close in on his lumbering, unarmed cargo ship. The other is the pirate captain, Muse, who has extremely dangerous paymasters to appease back in Somalia, and who’d prefer not to perform dangerous ship-to-ship gymnastics in big swells.
As the distance closes between the vessels, the two men come within range of each other’s radios, and the bluffing begins.
Muse tells Philips that he and his three ragged shipmates are the Somali coastguard and that they must be allowed aboard as part of a routine check.
Philips, in turn, broadcasts what he hopes sounds like a convincing conversation with a US warship, pretending to be both himself and a naval officer confirming that a drone strike is on its way.
This week I thought of those weak bluffs as two other desperate men tried to make themselves look more powerful than they are as they drift in the political doldrums around Nkandla.
The other desperate man is Cyril Ramaphosa, faced with three scenarios: either Zuma comes quietly, or he goes nowhere, which makes a mockery of the courts, or it all goes horrifyingly and violently wrong, and Zuma becomes a martyr.
The first, obviously, is Jacob Zuma, telling us that he respects the law even as he takes the salute of a private army and giggles about not being vaccinated, while hosting a superspreader event.
That giggle, however, is now tinged with desperation, because Zuma is finally being forced to do what populist charlatans spend their whole lives avoiding: seeing if anyone shows up when it really matters.
For decades he has created a mythology around himself of the adored son of the soil, the red-blooded man of the people, his claims and demands always backed up by the implied support of millions.
He and his boosters sold it hard and well, helped in no small part by being able to contrast him with the aloof technocrat Thabo Mbeki. But what is astonishing is that, even now, some journalists are still playing his game.
Just last week we read that Zuma was going to “address the nation” on Sunday night, as if he was still a head of state. The private army outside his compound (so much for those security upgrades, right?) was unblushingly referred to as “Zulu legions”, as if they were part of some legally recognised service branch and not a mess of paramilitary Zulu nationalists, traditionalists and cosplaying Zuma fanboys.
Finally, there was the aerial footage of the motorcade en route to Nkandla, presented as news but carefully framed to feel unending and infinitely potent, as if Leni Riefenstahl had been reanimated to make a traffic jam look like dawn at Isandlwana.
History, politics, power, land — we were being encouraged to think of everything except the basic arithmetic that fading populists can never face. After all, if there were 1,000 cars in that cavalcade, if 10,000 South Africans rocked up at Nkandla, it means that — listen carefully — 99.8% of South Africans didn’t.
The other desperate man is Cyril Ramaphosa, faced with three scenarios: either Zuma comes quietly, or he goes nowhere, which makes a mockery of the courts, or it all goes horrifyingly and violently wrong, and Zuma becomes a martyr.
Ramaphosa cannot countenance the second or third outcomes, but for the first to happen, he needs a team in Nkandla that is highly skilled in diplomacy, crowd control, damage control and self-control. What he has is Bheki Cele, a cartoonish bomb-disposal technician, whose preferred method is to pound on the bomb with a hammer for half an hour, yelling at it for being a naughty bomb, before wandering away to find some pensioners to water-cannon.
This, I suspect, is why the police, so eager to arrest surfers and joggers, have been largely invisible during the standoff: it’s not hypocrisy so much as official recognition of how supremely limited they are, and now catastrophically incendiary they might still be.
Luckily, Ramaphosa could send Lindiwe Sisulu to Nkandla, where she posed for dramatic photographs before thanking armed paramilitary goons for, I assume, trying to subvert the constitution she swore to serve.
According to Sisulu, she and other NEC members had taken “turns” to speak to Zuma, which suggests a sort of babysitting schedule, whereby each delegation knocked gently on his door, tiptoed inside, checked if his dummy was still in the cot, before crooning: “Rock-a-bye uBaba, on the treetop; when the wind blows the cradle will rock; when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, but don’t worry, we’ll imply that the bough was undermined by the media and that this is all just a big misunderstanding ...”
So what happens at the end of Captain Philips? Well let’s just say that nobody wants that outcome.
So for now, let the bluffers bluff.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.