In 10 days, Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver his state of the nation address, which means that even now his writers are hard at work crafting a speech that doesn’t draw too much attention to the fact that it’s being delivered in Cape Town’s city hall because parliament got set on fire.
Why parliament got set on fire, of course, is still being weighed up by the courts, which is one of the reasons I’m hesitant to name it as a deliberate act of political violence.
The other reason is that I know my country.
If that fire had happened in the first episode of a Danish thriller, the fact that parliament’s sprinklers weren’t working and nobody was watching the CCTV screens would immediately point to a conspiracy. But here, in the land of the eternally deployed cadre, one should always consider the possibility that it’s just one of those things that happen when people are paid by the state to gently sip oxygen as they gaze unblinkingly at TikToks of cats pushing vases off shelves.
No, it is very unlikely that the fire will get much coverage at Sona22. Which is a pity for Ramaphosa’s writers, because they’re not exactly flush with good material to bulk out the speech to its traditional length of four lifetimes.
In fact one can understand why, in past years, they’ve given up entirely and resorted to slogans like Ramaphosa’s presidency-defining celebration of paralysis, “Watch This Space”.
The benefits of slogans are obvious, especially if you pay your writers by the word and that R11bn loan from the World Bank hasn’t cleared yet.
Even better, you might not have to pay anyone at all. The fact that there has been no official noise made about Lindiwe Sisulu plagiarising a British politician suggests that word-theft is condoned or at least ignored by the Ramaphosa administration, opening the door to stealing and recycling some of the best rhetorical flourishes of the past.
Not that all of them are appropriate, mind you. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends” sounds like a memo from Patricia de Lille to the Beitbridge branch of ACME Fencing And What Have You Pty Ltd.
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself” is simply not true: anyone who lives in a country in which DD Mabuza is a heartbeat away from the presidency has a very great deal to fear.
If I’m sounding a little bitter, it’s because I’m jealous of Ramaphosa’s writers. The truth is I would love to write for the president because it has always been my dream to get paid a lot of money to write fiction.
Even Kennedy’s most famous exhortation to “ask not what your country can do for you” feels out of place here, mainly because we all stopped asking that question years ago after it was answered by a little handwritten sign sticky-taped to the inside of the window, explaining that the system is down and nobody knows when it will be back up.
Luckily for Ramaphosa’s writers, however, there are plenty of encouragingly meaningless slogans to choose from in the private sector.
Consider, for example, Standard Bank’s previous slogan, “Moving Forward”, which tried to pretend that forward movement was exciting and modern and not literally the first thing our ancestors mastered when they dragged themselves, fin over fin, onto that primordial beach where they were met by a banker who offered them a home loan at prime plus five.
If Ramaphosa feels that “Moving Forward” is promising too much — and, to be fair, those fish moved at breakneck speed, taking just 30-million years to crawl up onto land — he could always try Standard Bank’s new slogan, “It Can Be”, three words that pretend to offer boundless possibilities but which, in fact, act as a sort of existential hedged bet; a cautious admission that it is possible, given the right circumstances, that reality might continue to exist.
If I’m sounding a little bitter, it’s because I’m jealous of Ramaphosa’s writers. The truth is I would love to write for the president because it has always been my dream to get paid a lot of money to write fiction.
The trouble is, I’m not sure I have the talent to spin that amount of political straw into rhetorical gold. It’s one thing to have a flashy turn of phrase, but what could any self-respecting writer, or even a slightly self-hating one, do with Ramaphosa’s promise of a “smart city” back in 2019?
Yes, Ramaphosa had made some small and cautious steps in the right direction, but the leader of the ANC announcing that he intends to build an ultra-modern city for half a million people is like someone’s left buttock announcing its intention to become a ballroom dancer. I’m not saying it couldn’t work as a reality TV show (“It’s been a long and disheartening week for the buttock, and it still can’t find a pair of tap shoes, or feet to put them on”) but an audience can only suspend its disbelief so far.
Which is a terrible pity, because there are very real, very unfunny things that need to be said at Sona22: about the poison of xenophobia being injected into the nervous system of our politics by opportunists; about the necessity of transforming corruption from a culture into a taboo; about establishing oversight bodies and legal safeguards to prevent another spree by state captors; about when the gangrene of cadre deployment will be ended.
We have the writers to craft all those words, with power and integrity and gravitas.
If only we had a president to read them.
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