Many years ago I found myself ghostwriting a book for a psychic who, it later turned out, had somehow failed to foresee the terribly few copies the book would eventually sell.
It was a happy working relationship. She was fey but extremely charming, which meant she got on well, not only with me but also with the invisible dead people who sat in on our sessions.
I also found the process reassuringly familiar. I was a sportswriter at the time and therefore quite used to talking to people who weren’t entirely present, or who were making predictions that didn’t pan out then explaining them away as if I’d been right all along.
As the weeks went by, however, and I slowly gained an insight into just how hard a psychic has to work to make ends meet, I began to ask myself the obvious question: if she could see the future, why wasn’t she rich?
When I finally asked her, she explained that her gift was rare and fragile and could not be used for a grubby thing like self-enrichment, which I suppose explains our eventual sales figures. But, she said, smiling rather sheepishly, she had received one particularly juicy message from the beyond.
She didn’t know when or under which circumstances, but she knew for sure that oil would be discovered in Namibia.
Over the weekend, as the Namibian government confirmed that recent exploration has revealed commercially viable quantities of oil off its coast — possibly in the billions of barrels — I wondered how my former colleague was doing and whether she’s available for a quick visit from me, my atlas and my hastily drawn-up nondisclosure agreement.
As I read the rest of the news, however, I realised how little of it was surprising or difficult to predict.
It wouldn’t have taken a psychic, for example, to predict that ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe would end up arguing, as he did over the weekend, that if the party is going to reserve a quarter of senior positions for “youth” candidates, then “youth” should be redefined to include cadres up to the age of 50.
This is what happens when it’s all been stolen and broken and burnt for firewood; when there’s so little brain activity that Tony Yengeni is not only still a senior figure in the party but can go on national TV and insist that the ANC is mostly clean.
It sounds absurd, but it’s simply the next logical step in a process begun back in 2015, when Collen Maine was elected president of the ANC Youth League despite being on the wrong side of his mid-30s. (That’s as specific as anyone can get: in 2017, the Youth League refused to provide the ID numbers of Maine and other league members to whose rapidly advancing age was raising eyebrows.)
Defending his proposal, Mabe argued “the secretary-general of the Zanu-PF Youth League is well over 60”, which seemed a difficult sort of self-parody to trump. And yet on Monday it was surpassed by something else that was entirely predictable: Tony Yengeni going on TV to claim that the ANC isn’t corrupt.
Again, this looks like a bad joke, and yet again I would argue this is the inevitable, inexorable next step of a dying regime. This is what happens when it’s all been stolen and broken and burnt for firewood; when there’s so little brain activity that Tony Yengeni is not only still a senior figure in the party but can go on national TV and insist the ANC is mostly clean.
You definitely wouldn’t have needed a psychic to tell you, a few years back, that this weekend Cyril Ramaphosa, accompanied by crowds of officials, would be posing for pictures of himself staring admiringly at some fresh tar, allegedly filling a pothole.
It was a dismal scene, and it was loudly denounced by the EFF’s Floyd Shivambu as “desperate grandstanding”.
Ordinarily I would agree with him: as one of this country’s leading experts in desperate grandstanding, Shivambu knows it when he sees it.
In this case, however, I think he’s wrong. It wasn’t cynical grandstanding. On the contrary, I think the happy, self-satisfied expressions on the faces of the pothole-viewing party were genuine. Because that’s what happens when you finally reach that stage of the collapse where splatting down some wet tar is as impressive to you and your helpless coterie of know-nothings as a newly finished pyramid being inspected by a pharaoh.
It’s also why transport minister Fikile Mbalula tweeted those pictures. If he or any of his aides understood how little they’d achieved, they’d have found them as excruciating as everyone else did.
But they don’t understand anything, and so there they all were, crowding round the smallest possible bit of maintenance they could have done, like Egyptian courtiers hoping to be included in the historical account being chiselled into granite nearby: “Behold, ye future ages, this gaping chasm filled by the radiance of the Sun God Cyril — long may his herd increase, unless he finds a cash buyer, in which case may his herd rapidly decrease — and the genius of our greatest engineers!
“Marvel at the spectacle of yon roller, heavy as a hippopotamus and parked, well, er, kind of parked across where the Sun God’s Beemer has to drive. Can we move the roller? Guys? The roller? Oh, the keys are missing? You think they fell into the pothole just before the tar went in? Damn ...”
No, you don’t need to be psychic to see where the ANC is going. As for the rest of us, well, how about Namibia?
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