TOM EATON | Water cheek! Who are we to question the KZN premier’s priorities?

Social media is notorious for allowing people to hide their true beliefs or personalities behind a screen of performative righteousness. But this week a number of South Africans didn’t so much drop the veil as rip it into shreds and set it on fire, as they broadcast a startlingly honest view of our addiction to terrible government.

This is not a new affliction, of course. We’ve had absolutely rotten rulers since the start, from beauts like Willem Adriaan van der Stel and Shaka to the corrupt racists of the apartheid regime and the desperados who brought you fire-pools, the Guptas, Eskom, Marikana, disappearing railways lines and Bathabile Dlamini.

I think, however, we tend to tell ourselves that these creatures are imposed on us by the historical gods; that any support they might have enjoyed inside their kingdoms or laagers or Saxonwold shebeens was fake, extracted through fear or fuelled by patronage; that no ordinary South Africans could have genuinely admired their ideas and methods.

Which brings me back to social media, and the very unflattering things it can reveal about what many of us really want.

It was back in January when I saw one of the most telling examples of what I’m talking about.

Julius Malema had just issued some edict or another to the ANC, demanding that the party do X or Y or Z, and people were taking to Twitter to ask what gave the play-play commander-in-chief the right to dictate policy to another party.

This week I was reminded that it’s not just the fanatics who install politicians as unquestionable deities and demand to be trampled underfoot so that they can kiss the foot as it comes down on their faces.

Under one of these questions, an EFF supporter had replied: “Who are you to question politicians on their political postures?”

It was a statement that revealed a view of politics rooted at least 500 years in the past, in which unelected kings pretend to enact the infallible, unquestionable will of God, and to ask them to explain themselves is not just treasonous but blasphemous.

So far, so EFF. In my most recent book, I described the party as a sort of millenarian cult, a radical offshoot of the mother church, its dogma based on condemning the moral decay of that church, while promising apocalypse and salvation for the chosen few. It makes sense that its followers would believe that lowly mortals should never question the priests.

But this week I was reminded that it’s not just the fanatics who install politicians as unquestionable deities and demand to be trampled underfoot so that they can kiss the foot as it comes down on their faces.

This week, as disaster relief efforts got under way in KwaZulu-Natal, and thousands of residents queued for water, various media reported that a water tanker had been seen parked outside the home of premier Sihle Zikalala.

Zikalala denied that he had diverted the tanker for personal use, and his wife insisted she’d used the water to cook for displaced residents, but angry neighbours — and the driver of the tanker, who claimed that he’d been diverted from Tongaat — told a different story.

Now, I’m cautious about jumping to conclusions on this one. Where the ANC is concerned, you have to consider a dizzying array of scenarios, from tone-deafness, confusion and stupidity right the way through to flagrant corruption, arrogance and even factional smear campaigns.

Where the ANC is concerned, you have to consider a dizzying array of scenarios, from tone-deafness, confusion and stupidity right the way through to flagrant corruption, arrogance and even factional smear campaigns.

In other words, I’m not going to pretend to know whether the Zikalalas were trying to help or whether they were behaving like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

What I do know, however, is that a great many people would be perfectly happy to be lorded over by a pair of unaccountable French aristocrats.

No sooner had TimesLIVE posted the story on its Facebook page than the comments began. Admittedly, many expressed alarm or disgust at what looked like an abuse of power. But for every one of those, there seemed to be another not just excusing the possibility that Zikalala had put himself above the people he swore to serve, but insisting that such an act represented the natural order of things.

To be fair, some tried to hide their masochism behind sensible arguments about division of labour, suggesting that Zikalala was too busy “running the province” to be queuing for water. I’m not sure which is more naive: believing that Zikalala runs the province from his home, or that anyone at all is running KZN.

But the rest let their feudal freak flags fly, all but invoking the medieval God-King-Man hierarchy.

“Why should he queue, they are not equal,” wrote one.

“For goodness sake, [the] guy is premier, nothing wrong with water delivered to his home first,” said another.

“I don’t praise anybody or think anybody is better or whatever,” wrote a third shortly before revealing that he does, in fact, think some people are better or whatever. “But yes, he is supposed to get water. He is a special person ... You are not special, just live with that.”

In their defence, at least that commenter was still claiming to think. But soon I discovered the ultimate courtier, prostrate before Good King Sihle...

“He is premier. He thinks on your behalf and coordinates the logistics for your water supply.”

He thinks on your behalf.

Holy mother of God.

It was all fantastically depressing. But then came Sentle, reminding me that we are still a funny, unruly nation that calls bullshit when we see it. And I think Sentle deserves the last word.

“People are unfair,” she wrote. “The man is short. How is he going to carry just one bucket all the way to that mansion? It’s heavy, plus he might not be seen by the truck driver and then he gets crushed and we have to elect a new person.”

Long live the Sentles of SA.