As the president frantically scrabbles through his Rolodex of alibis ahead of Thursday’s state of the nation address, and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma asks her special team of pleasure-killing gnomes how much electricity could be freed up by banning rotisserie chickens under a possible new state of disaster, the rest of us are marking a major milestone in our ongoing state of absurdity: today is our 100th consecutive day of load-shedding, a monument to such immense and unique failure that everybody in the ANC deserves to take a bow.
For many pundits, today probably feels inevitable. They can draw a clear and damning line from Thabo Mbeki, deciding that beetroot and garlic were more important to the running of a modern state than new power stations, to the giggling Sun King in his Nkandla Versailles, pawning the family silver to keep his courtiers in tassels and pom-poms, to Cyril Ramaphosa, telling us in 2019 to “watch this space” then filling it with nothing but a sorrowful wheeze, like a bagpipe slowly deflating.
They can tell you about dire warnings in white papers; about looming realities that were either ignored or never understood in the first place; about the inevitable things that happen when a corrupt party, running a corrupt state, starts believing that power stations are there to generate personal wealth first and electricity second.
Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps today’s milestone was a scientific certainty, as predictable as knowing that combining two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom creates water, or combining Fikile Mbalula with government creates failure.
Still, I can’t help feeling that we’ve also been extraordinarily unlucky.
After all, there are other countries struggling to supply enough electricity to their citizens.
There are other one-party states that refuse to countenance competence and innovation, clinging to cadre deployment and cronyism and calling them revolution and liberation.
There are other countries with parties whose supporters refuse to vote them out, no matter how wretched they are, because of what their ideological opponents did when they were in power.
There are other countries with arrogant and stupid leaders who endlessly insult the intelligence of the people they pretend to serve.
There are other countries crippled by corruption and embedded mafias.
This ship isn’t sinking because it hit an iceberg. It’s sinking because the captain and his officers sold the hull for scrap.
Yes, we can find parts of our crisis replicated perfectly all over the world. But for all of them to come together, at the same time and in the same place, feels less like scientific certainty than the work of a spiteful fairy or at least a particularly mediocre novelist.
Certainly, the on-the-nose symmetry of this week reeks of lazy fiction. In his last Sona, Ramaphosa promised a new social contract within 100 days. In the last 100 days, that new social contract has been clearer than ever: charge your devices when you can, and keep the thermos full.
Mbalula, of course, is having none of it, telling a crowd in Durban not to “listen to liars who say the ANC does nothing, while speaking inside RDP houses built by the ANC, in a queue to get child support grants, walking on roads built by the ANC”.
To be fair, he’s not wrong about the roads: you have to walk on ANC-built roads because if you drive you break your axels. For the rest, however, it was yet another glimpse into what we shall laughingly refer to as Mbalula’s mind, a place in which you don’t even pretend to try to separate party and state; in which you boast about poor people having to walk to get grants because there’s no affordable public transport and no employment prospects; where you pretend that the RDP housing initiative had anything to do with your blighted generation.
Of course, Mbalula is safe from any potential cabinet reshuffle that might happen before Thursday. Where Sol Plaatjie, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo became secretary-general of the ANC by being highly intelligent and potent activists, Mbalula has done it by transforming himself into a living, breathing rubber stamp, just begging to be inked up and banged down on anything Ramaphosa needs legitimised.
Dlamini-Zuma, on the other hand, only has one thing going for her: the public can’t dislike her very much more, so if somebody is going to announce that hot chickens are putting an intolerable load on the national grid and that Bheki Cele is going to sjambok you if try to boil your kettle before 8am, she’s probably the one to do it.
Of course, some might argue a cabinet reshuffle at this point is a rearrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic, but to recycle that cliché, or at least to focus on that part of the disaster, would be a mistake.
For starters, this ship isn’t sinking because it hit an iceberg. It’s sinking because the captain and his officers sold the hull for scrap.
Mainly, however, the metaphor doesn’t work because nobody in Ramaphosa’s inner circle is going to get so much as a toe even faintly damp. At absolutely worst (to run with the analogy) this week is about deciding who gets to sit where in the lifeboats, who they can trust to transport their cash and hat-boxes once they’re ushered ashore, and, if things go terribly in 2024, what sort of new career-cum-hobby they’d like to dabble with in their old age.
Yes, as we mark 100 consecutive days of darkness, the ANC should definitely take a bow.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.