At long last, the ANC has seen the writing on the wall, hired consultants to read it and explain it, and has started to prepare for the onrushing future.
To be clear, I’m not talking about Cyril Ramaphosa telling a crowd in Lichtenburg over the weekend that the ANC will no longer appoint “Mickey Mouse people” to run municipalities.
That was clearly empty rhetoric, and fairly ignorant, too: Mickey Mouse has managed to keep domesticated animals like Pluto alive for almost a century, which automatically puts him in a league above parliamentary speaker Thandi “Animal Farm” Modise, and he remains the figurehead of a company worth about R3.6-trillion, which is R3.6-trillion more than the ANC has in its bank account.
In short, the party should be so lucky to have Mickey Mouse people in its ranks.
No, the real action plan is much easier to implement than finding that tiny cross-section of cadres who are not only loyal but also able to perform modest administrative tasks.
It is, simply, to discredit the people who are going to put you in jail.
Of course, this isn’t a new approach, but the ANC seems to be recommitting to it with renewed urgency as the Gotterdammerung of 2024 approaches.
Well, except for Lindiwe Sisulu. Back in January, the tourism minister was all fire and brimstone, denouncing black judges who disagree with her as “mentally colonised” “house negroes”. In June she doubled down, insisting she stood by every word she’d written, or at least dictated to her assistant over a lunch of oysters and bubbly.
Last week, however, as she emailed out her latest diatribe against the judiciary, you could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Not that I blame her. Sisulu has recently emerged from a leadership popularity contest in which she received only 66 nominations, and she knows at least 70 people. Christmas is stressful enough without having to accept that your career is deader than the turkey in front of you, and that at least three of the people sitting at the table probably helped kill it. (“Oh now you can pass me the gravy, but last month, when I really needed it, then you suddenly had principles?”)
Others, at least, are poisoning the wells of justice with much more vigour.
Consider Gwede Mantashe, for example, who this week told News24 that chief justice Raymond Zondo was himself a beneficiary of the cadre deployment he described as unconstitutional in his report.
It was a magnificently two-faced jibe, playing beautifully to both sides of the ANC fence on which Mantashe pirouettes. For the Ramaphosists, it was a clear defence of the policy of cadre deployment, a policy the president endorsed as recently as August. For the Radical Economic Transformation crowd, Mantashe was clearly accusing Zondo of hypocrisy and the judiciary of inconsistency.
In short, the party should be so lucky to have Mickey Mouse people in its ranks.
It goes without saying that they can’t both be true, but this, after all, is a party which constantly fails then marches on its own offices to protest its own failures. In the ANC of Mantashe, where all that matters is clinging on to privilege by the hangnail of shamelessness, it makes absolute sense that Zondo can simultaneously be a symbol of the triumph of the revolution and a stooge of shadowy counterrevolutionary forces. The only thing Zondo can’t be, apparently, is left alone to do his job.
To his credit, KwaZulu-Natal MEC and leader of the “Taliban” faction, Siboniso Duma, was much more explicit: having previously suggested “something must be done” about the judiciary, Duma told a crowd in Port Shepstone on Saturday that what SA really needs is leaders with the courage to ignore the rule of law and basic accounting.
“People who don’t change people’s lives, who are apologetic and hide behind being stopped by the Public Finance Management Act, are not cut out to be public servants because they won’t change people’s lives,” he explained.
Given his relationship to fiduciary rigour, it may surprise you to learn Duma is a vocal proponent of setting up a sovereign wealth fund in his province; but before you cast aspersions about how such a fund might look in the hands of life-changing leaders who are not “being stopped by the Public Finance Management Act”, please remember that any theft that might occur is not the fault of any individual public officials but rather the fault of capitalism.
Indeed, explained Duma, “without capitalism, there would be no corruption”. Yes, dear reader, it turns out that before about 1500, when kings sold their people into slavery, or taxed them for eating salt or having windows, and then spent the money on jewellery for their pet goat or on bribes to keep them in power, it wasn’t corruption. It was just — checks notes — leadership unconstrained by downers like auditors or laws written in constitutions.
In the coming months, as a growing number of ANC apparatchiks do the sums and start realising all sorts of protections from all sorts of harsh financial and legal realities might be coming to an end in 2024, this rhetoric will become more frequent, more shrill and more absurd.
We’ll be told it is the constitution, not the ANC’s corruption and callousness, that is keeping poor people poor. We’ll be told justice is unjust.
Anything so they don’t have to go tell it to a judge.
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