TOM EATON | Remember, Thabo, you created this monster, or has ‘intellect’ failed you?

Thabo Mbeki has often been described as an intellectual, reminding us of just how few South Africans have actually met one.

Not that the former president hasn’t flighted some big ideas, of course.

His theory that garlic and beetroot could treat Aids better than antiretrovirals was remarkable: history is full of geniuses who died for their ideas, but it takes someone truly special to have 300,000 other people die for his.

Consider, likewise, his revolutionary belief that Robert Mugabe should be protected not only from British imperialists, but also from the flagrant and destructive will of Zimbabwean voters.

And let us not forget his claim that the arms deal, which brought together the patronage machine we know as the ANC with one of the dirtiest industries in the world, involved no corruption whatsoever.

Big ideas, all. But are they enough to gain him entry into the intellectual pantheon? I’m just not sure.

Still, as Mbeki once told election observers in Harare, you can’t keep a good man down. And at the weekend he was back, having another stab at greatness as he told an audience in the Free State that “if the ANC collapsed today, ceased to exist, this country would become ungovernable simply because of the influence of the party”.

Now there are two ways to read this.

The first is that Mbeki somehow believes SA is currently governable and that the ANC is governing it.

Last year President Cyril Ramaphosa went to Ekurhuleni just before the local government elections and told residents protesting about blackouts that if they didn’t vote for the ANC “electricity may never be restored”. What made it such a disgusting bit of blackmail was that he knew it wasn’t true.

Mbeki, on the other hand, might actually believe the ANC is a governing party rather than a tapeworm in the stomach of a sickly cow that has been abandoned to wander off a cliff.

Mbeki, on the other hand, might actually believe the ANC is a governing party rather than a tapeworm in the stomach of a sickly cow that has been abandoned to wander off a cliff.

He might believe it because that’s what happens when a bookish policy wonk is installed as a god-king and surrounded by people who call him an intellectual. No matter how grounded you are at the start, by the end you really do believe that you and your magic stress ball are the only things keeping the rains from failing and the crops from withering, and Fikile Mbalula from having to get a job for the first time in his life.

The second reading is less fun.

It is, simply, that Mbeki has met the more, er, muscular elements of his party and he knows that if the ANC collapses the country will become ungovernable because those elements will make sure it does. The “influence of the party” goes both ways, after all.

I don’t know which one he meant. What I do know, however, is that Mbeki has either forgotten he was president or wants us to forget it.

As he bemoaned the state of the party it never seemed to occur to him that what he was describing was the inevitable result of the policy he instituted, defended and pushed through at all costs. He called it “cadre deployment”. History will call it attempted economic murder.

It was almost surreal to watch; this worried, sad man, looking up at a burning house and asking how this could have happened when all he did was sack the fire brigade and replace it with his nephew, who is currently under investigation for arson, and his nephew’s wife, who runs a successful business exporting fire hoses.

Listening to Mbeki struggling to understand how we got here, I could sense for a moment what it must be like to live in the endless, safe present of the political inner circle, where the past is in the hands of your biographers and the future is guarded by your financial adviser.

It’s become popular to insist we are frogs being boiled alive in a pot. We are not. That beloved science experiment is a myth: when you put a frog in a pot of water and raise the temperature, the frog leaves. 

Then again, perhaps it’s human nature to want to ease the present by disconnecting from the past. The trouble is, however, that without perspective the present can become a little too soothing.

Consider this week’s budget speech, coming at the start of a year which, barring the usual kerfuffles, has started fairly serenely.

There have been no major economic or political upheavals. Finance minister Enoch Godongwana will announce small adjustments; a touch on the tiller here, a minor change to the rigging there.

And yet despite this relative calm, the rand is trading at almost exactly the same level it plunged to in that nightmarish week in 2015, when Jacob Zuma fired Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister, replaced him with Des “Weekend Special” van Rooyen, then fired him too.

In dollar terms, 2015’s existential crisis is 2022’s equilibrium.

Have we become habituated to failure? Perhaps. I think Mbeki’s cadre deployment has lowered the bar of our collective expectations further than we can know.

But are we doomed?

It’s become popular to insist we are frogs being boiled alive in a pot. We are not. That beloved science experiment is a myth: when you put a frog in a pot of water and raise the temperature, the frog leaves.

Besides, we’re not amphibians trapped in a hellish experiment by sadistic scientists. Instead, we are citizens in a still-functioning democracy. And there’s an election two years away.

Will we survive the end of the ANC? I’m no intellectual, but I can’t help feeling we will.