TOM EATON | The ANC marching to ‘reclaim its sovereignty’ says it all

There is nothing unusual about the ANC marching against itself. The party has marched against itself to protest load-shedding, its inability to tackle violence against women and, most recently, the continued presidency of its own leader. But Wednesday’s march featured a truly special form of buck-passing.

Perhaps that’s why it was led by the ANC’s official gaslighter, spokesperson Pule Mabe, whose job it is to tell us the ANC is a competent government, and who generally delivers that lie with some aplomb.

Recently, however, things have been going wrong for Mabe. The problem? His subconscious has started bursting through into public view.

In one recent Freudian slip, for example, he explained the party didn’t know where it’s next windfall was coming from by saying: “If the ANC was running a cash-in-transit heist, or something like that, then it would say, ‘We know the robberies we’re going to be conducting in the next two months will give us enough.’”

On Wednesday, the accidental truths kept coming as he told Newzroom Afrika that the ANC had joined a protest organised by the ANC to “help reclaim our sovereignty” and to help the ANC “reclaim its ability to lead society”.

Now, this was no throwaway comment. In May this year, Mabe told City Press: “As the national spokesperson, I don’t express my own views. Every view I articulate out there is that of the ANC.”

In other words, by saying the ANC was marching to “reclaim our sovereignty” and the party’s “ability to lead society”, Mabe was officially announcing the ruling party’s belief that it is no longer in control of the state and does not have the ability to lead society, two facts I think we can all agree upon.

Dog whistles, after all, imply a hidden message or at least an attempt to hide a true agenda, and the ANC made no such effort this week, inviting the public via an official tweet to ‘Join the Protest Action against #illegal immigrants #zamazamas #rapists’.

What Pule was hoping to do, of course, was blow into an extremely old and well-blown dogwhistle, one that has been used by desperate or openly malevolent governments for centuries: blaming evil foreigners.

Then again, perhaps this isn’t a fair judgment. Dogwhistles, after all, imply a hidden message or at least an attempt to hide a true agenda, and the ANC made no such effort this week, inviting the public via an official tweet to “join the Protest Action against #illegal immigrants #zamazamas #rapists”.

For some time now the ANC has been actively pushing the idea that it can’t be held responsible for anything because it doesn’t really hold the levers of power. You’ve heard it over and over again: “It can’t end load-shedding because it can’t control Eskom; it can’t fix the economy because the Reserve Bank and capitalism still exist; it can’t fire corrupt officials because, well, reasons.”

Its approach to the undeclared war on South African women, however, has been less about buck-passing than general bafflement. For years the ANC’s endlessly-repeated line was that rape is something that happens to women, not something that men do to women. (A similar narrative is still prevalent in the crisis of teenage pregnancy, where officials keep telling girls to stop “falling pregnant” without telling boys — or men — to stop having sex with or raping girls.)

In recent years, some in the ANC have tried to shift the emphasis. Last year, for example, Cyril Ramaphosa put his name to an essay explicitly stating: “Gender-based violence is ... a problem of male violence,” and that “it is predominantly men who are rapists”.

The problem with that approach, however, is that acknowledging the crisis around South African men forces the ANC to create a policy to tackle it, which would distract it from the much more important work of securing the last scraps of swag before it starts losing its grip on power.

Thank God, then, for people like Mabe and organisers of Wednesday’s march, and their brilliant solution. Invoke the idea of an invasion by foreign rapists, and you don’t have to do any actual nation-building. Drop in the notion that this invasion has taken away your sovereignty, and you don’t even have to pretend you’re in charge.

Imagine if they were as good at governing as they are at avoiding it ...