TOM EATON | I wouldn’t Cope as an opposition leader watching in Terror as ANC robs us blind

Politics can be terribly cruel sometimes and even the most jaded cynic had to feel a twinge of pity for Cope leader Mosiuoa Lekota, getting suspended by his party for being a disruptive influence even as DA voters rallied around John “Roadkill” Steenhuisen and ANC officials in KwaZulu-Natal crawled backwards into Nkandla to ask Jacob Zuma for what they unironically called his “wisdom”.

According to a statement issued by Cope on Monday, Lekota has been suspended for “the role he plays in dividing Cope” and “the frequent meetings he convenes to form parallel structures to Cope”.

I feel that this is harsh.

First, given how few members Cope has these days, there is a strong argument to be made that Lekota splits the party in half every time he nips out for a packet of Nik Naks.

The other charge also seems unfair: the only structure that could conceivably be parallel to Cope is something lying in pieces on a floor, perhaps a small Lego house that has been knocked off the table by Cope’s treasurer (who is a cat); and if Lekota wants to meet other people who also like building Lego houses, why shouldn’t he?

No doubt Lekota will be quietly paraphrasing the gospel of Matthew, consoling himself with the knowledge that where two or three are gathered together in Cope’s name, or maybe just two, since the third said he was going out for cigarettes and never came back, or even one, when you think about where Cope is.

Still, it will have hurt to see the complete absence of visible blowback on Steenhuisen after the DA leader last week chose to describe his ex-wife and the mother of his children as “roadkill”, in public, during Women’s Month.

Steenhuisen has since explained that was an attempt at humour, telling the Daily Maverick that the podcast on which he committed the alleged joke is a place where “politicians are encouraged to show a lighter side of themselves”. If only he’d understood the brief and not confused “lighter” with “lightweight”.

Then again, Steenhuisen knows he doesn’t really have to guard himself the way a politician in a more, er, sophisticated set-up might. Sheltered employment, after all, works both ways: the deeper the ANC cadres embed themselves and the worse the ruling party becomes, the safer it becomes to be a leader of the opposition. Well, unless you’re Mmusi Maimane.

Certainly, when I suggested on social media that Steenhuisen had acted rather shamefully, a number of people hit back at once with an argument that is engraved on the wall of the Jobs-For-Life Pantheon of Mediocre Politics: “Would you rather have the ANC?”

The answer, of course, is no. And for people who believe the leader of a party is the party itself, and that the party itself is all that stands between them and the gulag, it’s a no that feels like winning an argument so resoundingly that you close that line of enquiry forever.

All of which is why Lekota must have been sick with envy and bitterness on Monday as he was told to hand over his official hand-drawn cardboard Cope badge and climb down out of the treehouse that has been the party’s headquarters since its tent was confiscated by its mom.

I’m being facetious, of course. Cope doesn’t have just two members: there are at least 14. They also don’t meet in a treehouse, because climbing ladders requires organisational skills they no longer possess.

The envy and bitterness, however, must surely be real, at least from time to time.

It’s easy to roll our eyes at opposition politicians when they make spectacles of themselves on Twitter, but I sometimes wonder how I’d fare in their position. I imagine what it is like to spend decades building consensus and pressing the flesh and seeking legal opinion and balancing the books and generally doing my homework. I imagine what it’s like to do all that while the other lot win election after election despite everyone knowing they’re robbing the country blind and pissing on the constitution. And I wonder how fair-minded and even-keeled I might stay under those reality-confounding conditions.

For Lekota, it must have been torture, suffering the indignity of being suspended by his own party just days after the ANC sent a delegation to ask for advice about political renewal and leadership from a man serving a 15-month prison term for contempt of court from the comfort of his home after scoring some sweet, sweet taxpayer-funded medical parole.

At the very least, Lekota could console himself with the fact that Zuma wasn’t the first stop for the wisdom-seeking delegation. That honour had gone to Thabo Mbeki, who last week reminded us of his intellectual immensity by insisting “the ANC is not corrupt, but it carries people who are corrupt within its ranks”. You know, the way you haven’t been mugged, you just carry knife blades within your body.

Yes, I feel for Lekota. The injustice of facing any kind of political censure in a country being sat on by the consequence-free ANC must burn.

Well, at least until he starts his next party, changing the letterhead from “Congress of the People” to “Congress of the Person”. Plus one cat ...