TOM EATON | SA and the ANC know it’s all over between us

The anniversaries continue to drift past like the sooty pages of a daily planner burnt in a house fire, swirling gently in the breeze.

Some still smell more sulphurous than others. On the weekend, the press marked the first anniversary of the riots in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, the shocking violence of a year ago standing in absurd relief to the almost total silence from the state about how it happened, who was responsible and what the plan is for when the inevitable food riots come.

Then again, we know what the plan is, thanks to all the other increasingly meaningless anniversaries that crowd around this one.

In a month, for example, it will be the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Marikana, an atrocity for which nobody has been held responsible, except, in some versions, the dead miners themselves.

This month, likewise, is the fourth anniversary of the election to the Gauteng provincial executive committee of Qedani Mahlangu, the person on whose watch, two years earlier, 144 people died in psychiatric facilities in Gauteng.

Mahlangu was hastily unelected — when Jessie Duarte thinks you’re toxic for the party you know you’re special — but the fact remains that nobody has gone to prison for allowing 144 people to die in fear and loneliness.

In July we also celebrate six months since parliament caught fire. Well, Jacob Zuma’s daughter does: the rest of us simply gaze at the hole in the roof and the military grade razor-wire blocking the entrance to Government Avenue and muse how some metaphors write themselves.

The dates go on. Today will be our 74th day of load-shedding this year. In a few days it will be the one-month anniversary of the end of the 100 days in which Cyril Ramaphosa promised he would … do … stuff.

And so the anniversaries drift on, hollowed out and pointless, like last month’s Youth Day, on which 70-year-olds recalled the courage of 60-year-olds while actual youths sat on the side of the road and stared at a future in which they might reach 60 without ever having had a job.

All of this, however, is inevitable. Anniversaries are given their meaning by relationships. When the relationship ends, they fade away. And SA and the ANC know it’s all over between us.

Some clearly want to make it a clean break. On Sunday, as the country woke to the news that 15 people had been massacred in a tavern in Orlando East, ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe demonstrated the ANC’s famous ability to read the room, telling the press that “the national security cluster of SA is not [there] to safeguard taverns”.

Others, however, are still hoping for a miracle.

Last week I read that former speaker Baleka Mbete is being tormented by the state of the ANC.

I was intrigued. Was she having regrets about doing nothing to challenge Thabo Mbeki’s murderous denialism or justifying her silence by insisting “it was not for me to talk because I was busy with parliament”? Was she ready to concede that perhaps she shouldn’t have deliberately ignored an arms deal whistle-blower, as she told the Zondo commission?

No. The crisis facing the party, she explained, was “agitation in the spirit world”, worsened by the fact that the ANC hadn’t done enough cleansing rituals.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, mostly because I was reading The Saturday Star, part of the stable that brought us another recent anniversary — happy imaginary first birthday to the imaginary Tembisa Decuplets for June 8, by the way! — but it was all true.

According to a long and anguished essay by Mbete in ANC Today, the diagnosis had first been shared with her by an elder in the Shembe church. The real clincher, however, had been “visits” by “the spirits of two … recently departed well-known comrades” who had confirmed that a “national cleansing ritual” was the way to go. (She didn’t mention whether this would be put to tender, but I would urge the metaphysically unscrupulous to keep watching the government gazette.)

I can’t speak for the ancestors, but I must say I think Mbete might be onto something. Certainly, I found my spirit exceptionally agitated on Monday as I read Ramaphosa’s latest letter to the nation, yet another masterclass in the sort of upbeat guff factory owners say when they come down to the floor and pretend to wiggle a knob for the cameras.

One paragraph, however, stood out above all the others.

“There is no reason,” wrote Ramaphosa, “why a country like ours — with the skills, capabilities and resources we have at our disposal — should have to endure a shortage of electricity.”

Except there is a reason. He looks at it every day in cabinet meetings. He looks at it every time Pule Mabe says it’s not the job of the security cluster to figure out how to enforce laws. He sees it every time Baleka Mbete and her ilk refuse to take responsibility for anything. You could even argue he sees it every time he looks in the mirror.

Those skills and capabilities? They’re leaving on airliners every week, like Eskom’s acting chief nuclear officer Riedewaan Barkadien, who is emigrating to Canada. At least the resources stay behind, but only because the ANC hasn’t figured out how to steal the sun and the wind.

No, the relationship is over and the anniversaries have all turned to ash.