TOM EATON | No matter how you look at it, our politics is smothered in hypocrisy

On Thursday, as a crack team of motivational speakers and life coaches distracted Cyril Ramaphosa long enough for his bodyguards to tackle him and wrestle his resignation letter away from him, a curiously timed bit of news was getting ready to drop.

According to something called the Social Research Foundation, a survey of 3,200 registered voters had suggested if Ramaphosa stepped down, the ANC would crash and burn in the next general election, with only 35% of current voters saying they would stick with a Cyril-less party.

With all due respect to the people who ran the poll, and to those who decided to publish it, perhaps to sway Ramaphosa as he gloomily plucked petals out of a daisy and murmured “They love me, they love me not …”, those numbers seem like absolute nonsense.

Everyone knows if Ramaphosa is ditched, and President David “Aeroflot” Mabuza is joined in the ensuing power vacuum by the likes of Malusi Gigaba and Andile Lungisa — both recently elected onto the ANC’s national executive committee — it is a certainty the ANC will win about 240% of the vote in 2024, depending on how many water jugs Lungisa can break over people’s heads and how many times Carl Niehaus can vote before his hand cramps up completely.

All of which made the president’s apparent eagerness to resign even more unnerving.

Of course, there were — and are — good reasons for why his heart might not be entirely in it. When you earn roughly R1m a day in interest simply by sitting in a chair and blinking slowly, there must be terribly little motivation to dive into a long and gruelling battle against supremely slippery customers. Sitting in court is all well and good if you have as few options as Jacob Zuma, but why opt for Stalingrad when you could simply walk away and go and live out your life in some faraway fairy-tale place like Paris or Zurich or Camps Bay?

It’s also possible Ramaphosa was thinking about his legacy, which is what you call a reputation once you’re too rich to care what normal people think about you.

Before last week, Ramaphosa’s legacy was modest at best, less “I came, I saw, I conquered” than “I came, I saw it was time for lunch, I told chef I wanted the tuna but with fewer capers this time, I waited, I ate, I had a nap”.

Still, there is a world of difference between dull and disgraced, and it’s possible he saw in his resignation an opportunity to write the final pages of his story on his own terms and in his own words.

Still, there is a world of difference between dull and disgraced, and it’s possible that he saw in his resignation an opportunity to write the final pages of his story on his own terms and in his own words.

Perhaps, in those fraught hours on Thursday morning, Ramaphosa simply predicted the spectacle that has been unfolding since he decided not to resign; a display of almost supernatural hypocrisy, as the architects of state capture lecture him and his faction on ethics, professionalism and the rule of law.

Certainly, Zuma has been in particularly full voice, bravely suspending his programme of end-of-life care, with its palliative singing and dancing at rallies, to wag his finger at Ramaphosa and to remind everyone the ANC is “not a circus”.

For once, I have to agree with the former president. Circus performers are highly-trained and extremely skilful, and if they fall they have only a net to save them, not a vast system of patronage, corrupt officials, legions of lawyers paid for by you and me, and, if all of those fail, the threat of violence and sedition.

The trouble with hypocrisy, however, is that there’s often a nugget of truth at its core. That is, after all, what makes it so maddening; that accurate condemnation of a real flaw in someone else that the accuser refuses to acknowledge in themselves.

Legal pundits will argue the merits of the section 89 report for months. Outside, in the mean and infinitely stupid streets of Twitter, the judiciary will be damned then lauded and then damned again, often on consecutive days, usually by the same people.

But what won’t change is the stain of hypocrisy, made worse by the ANC closing ranks around Ramaphosa just as it did around Zuma. Now, every word he speaks about tackling corruption or strengthening prosecuting authorities will be howled down by a deafening roar of whataboutism.

On Wednesday, Ramaphosa was a lame duck. On Thursday, that duck had its lame leg, and both its wings, amputated. If it recovers, all it will be able to do is bob quietly in the calmest waters it can find, or risk being carried away by the smallest current.

It’s a hot mess, but at least, along with the heat, there is a glimmer of light: the beginning of the end of one-party rule in South Africa. If Ramaphosa has bruised rather than broken the law, and can brazen his way through the next two years, eating the insults and keeping the pious hollow words to a minimum; if he can hold off the sort of people who postpone then cancel elections, or who produce 140% wins; he will put his party where it belongs: in the ground.

What comes after that will be noisy and messy and fantastically stressful; but we cannot live in a country that lives or dies by the stuffing of one rich man’s couch.