As the ANC in eThekwini celebrates the return to high office of a woman about to stand trial for fraud, corruption, money laundering and racketeering, a few die-hard idealists have tried to muster some of that righteous, mid-2010s, Zuma-Must-Fall outrage.
Ten years ago, before the Gupta leaks, before we understood that we have a private investment club instead of a government, I was one of them, like a shabby-genteel expat living in a small Sicilian town.
Every three months, when the new stretch of road outside the town collapses, he writes an angry letter to the council, demanding to know why the road keeps collapsing. He doesn’t understand that it keeps collapsing because the local mafia has the contract to rebuild it. He doesn’t understand that the purpose of the road is not to remain intact but to be rebuilt.
Now, however, I understand the road a bit better. Which is why, when I saw that Zandile Gumede had swept back into her former fiefdom, it felt less like a shocking aberration than a slightly nauseating inevitability, like when you’re a zombie and you’ve been watching your limbs rot and three of your toes finally stay behind in your slipper when you take it off before bed.
That general sense of knackered-ness even seems to have reached some of the villains who once enraged us simply by giggling in parliament.
At the weekend, barely 20 people came to Jacob Zuma’s pre-birthday party at Nkandla, despite Mzwandile Manyi having tied a very nice balloon to the tradesman’s entrance. (This is a joke. Manyi is much too busy to tie balloons onto things, what with spending his days running Zuma’s foundation and his evenings praying to the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy.)
Indeed, when Zuma failed to show up at court on Monday, and Manyi whipped out Mac Maharaj’s old Rolodex of well-thumbed lies, insisting that Zuma was “not in a condition” to have the day in court he’s been demanding for years, it felt like grubby business as usual rather than another shocking up-yours to the justice system.
On the one hand, I think that this de-escalation is healthy. The sooner you realise that you’re writing letters to the Sicilian mafia, the sooner you can start making more informed decisions about how to spend your time.
On the one hand, I think that this de-escalation is healthy. The sooner you realise that you’re writing letters to the Sicilian mafia, the sooner you can start making more informed decisions about how to spend your time.
The danger, however, is that once you’ve reached that point of essential disillusionment, some fairly nasty forms of government start looking better than misrule by arrogant criminals.
On Sunday, SABC foreign editor Sophie Mokoena tweeted: “Gwede Mantashe says the right wing organisations are on the rise and are hoping to take back political power in SA.”
Now, this should obviously be taken with a shovel-full of salt. The SABC, we learned on the weekend, is back to its old ways, censoring a Human Rights Watch report on Ukraine by replacing the word “war” with the more Pandor-ing “conflict”.
Mokoena likewise distinguished herself on the second day of the Russian invasion by tweeting: “Propaganda on steroids from both sides. A tough one for the media.” Ah, if only there were some way to figure out which country had invaded which, perhaps by studying the entrails of a temple goose …
Mantashe, however, wasn’t wrong. Whether it’s the Freedom Front+, the more openly populist EFF and Action SA, or even the Operation Dudula vigilantes, right-wing organisations are trying to step into the vacuum left by the ANC sucking all the money, expertise and hope out of public life.
They appeal to wildly different demographics, but at heart they all offer the right’s fundamental proposition: that Daddy has had it up to here with all the nonsense, and it’s time to take off his belt and deal out some law and order in this house.
Of course, that deep desire to be sat on is also prevalent in the ANC.
As the eThekwini conference got under way, former ANC councillor and recent convict Andile Lungisa tweeted a picture of Gumede with the caption: “Mam’Zandile Gumede fighting spirit is not different of [sic] Queen Nzinga, Queen Nefertari, Queen Makeda, Queen Nandi, Queen Amina, Queen Ranavalona …”
His knowledge of the past 3,000 years was impressive, but it also spoke volumes about the man and his faction that he chose to associate Gumede with a ruling class that was seldom troubled by pesky things like parliaments, elections and independent judiciaries. The urge to be a subject runs remarkably deep in many who pretend to be democrats.
The trouble is, Lungisa is not alone. Over the past month I’ve read hundreds of tweets by South Africans justifying Russia’s invasion and, while most boil down to the tit-for-tat logic of the kindergarten sandpit, many are written by people who are clearly very impressed by what they see as Vladimir Putin’s refusal to tolerate the societal decadence and moral decay wrought by the liberal order.
I know that Twitter isn’t real life, and I know that democracy has deep roots in this country. But when a government of self-proclaimed leftists does this much damage, it feels like common sense to move as far in the opposite direction as possible.
And if the people on the far end of the spectrum can provide safe streets and good jobs, how much do South Africans really care if they’re wearing military uniforms and holding their rallies in stadiums by torchlight?
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