President Cyril Ramaphosa has been a terrible disappointment in many ways, but even his harshest critics would have to agree that it was a brilliant bit of statecraft on his part a few years ago to move the state of the nation address (Sona) from the afternoon to the evening.
Give your speech in the late afternoon and you are speaking to a tired and irritable nation just itching for some hypocrite in a shiny suit to lie to it so it can spit invective at the telly or get on Twitter and denounce you as a gutless fantasist.
Give it at 7pm, however, and you are speaking to a nation happily preoccupied with domestic life. Suppers are being eaten, baths are being run, favourite TV shows are being anticipated: the bile of the day is dissolving and with it the public’s desire to fight with you or even to pay attention to you.
You can read your speech safe in the knowledge that by the time the media has picked over the text and told the public what to think of it, it will already be yesterday’s news and therefore well on its way to being released into forgetfulness and oblivion by SA’s five-second memory.
For writers on a Thursday afternoon deadline, however, Ramaphosa’s bath-time coup is decidedly awkward. We must file our columns or reports long before the speech gets under way and rely on speculation rather than fact.
All I can tell you with any authority is what I saw when I drove through Cape Town on Thursday, which was vast numbers of police — not enough to protect the country from the ANC, certainly, but enough to protect the ANC from itself — and a very imposing armoured vehicle with a water cannon on top, though it was unclear whether this had been deployed to deal with riots or the much more pressing threat of arsonists.
Luckily I’ve endured enough Sonas to be able to make an educated guess at what was said:
1. Since the previous Sona a year has passed and during this year things have happened.
2. Some of those things were good. Some were less good. [NOTE TO SELF: DON’T LOOK AT FIKILE WHEN YOU SAY “LESS GOOD”]
3. Last year I told you we would achieve certain things this year. I am happy to report that we are very close to achieving those things and I can tell you categorically that when I speak to you next year, we will be one year closer to having achieved them, which, when it happens, will be an incredible achievement and something for all of us to celebrate. Viva the continued rollout of the time-space continuum, viva!
4. Speaking of our many potential successes, we are embarking on a strategic plan of doing other things also, which we believe are increasingly likely to happen the longer they remain in the planning phase, which is reaching its end now and is about to transition from a proactive phase into an active phase and then a phase of actually happening. Watch this space!
5. We must, however, guard against hubris and we must admit that it is possible that good things will become less good things if they go less good or even bad. Because there is increasing evidence to suggest that bad things are bad, and we prefer good things.
6. To safeguard us from bad things I am announcing a raft of measures. Just that. It’s a raft. With, like, some measuring tape on top.
7. Here are four lines from a poem somebody in the presidency found on Wikiquote on Thursday afternoon.
8. I thank you.
I know. It’s silly, It’s unsophisticated. It’s shallow. It provides no solutions; no hope.
So how close did I get?
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