Half an hour into his address on Thursday evening, Cyril Ramaphosa’s mistake was clear: if he was going to make promises that nobody believed, he should at least have made promises that were excitingly unbelievable, like that he would finally bring Isidingo’s Cherel De Villiers-Heyns to justice or complete Lance Klusener’s quick single in the 1999 Cricket World Cup semifinal.
Instead, we heard a lot about social compacts, which was weird coming about a day after we learnt that the state’s tourism department is about to launch a manhunt for the whistle-blower who leaked the Tottenham Hotspur scandal, rather than fire the people who approved it in the first place.
Then again, you can’t really blame Ramaphosa for being bullish, what with living in a parallel universe in which South Africa is well on the way to becoming an economic powerhouse awash with milk and honey.
Indeed, there were periods on Thursday evening when it seemed that the president’s teleprompter had been hacked by a particularly naive and enthusiastic grade 8 who was preparing for an oral called “How I Would Fix South Africa If Reality Wasn’t Real”.
Of course, it wasn’t all utopian fantasy, as the EFF’s umpteenth staged ejection reminded South Africans why putting that party of performative nothings anywhere near the levers of power would guarantee disaster.
Likewise, speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula stumbled into all-too-honest reality at the start of the evening, as she tried to restore order and accidentally coined what should be the ANC’s slogan as it nears its death: “Honourable members, it is over, it can’t continue.”
Likewise, speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula stumbled into all-too-honest reality at the start of the evening, as she tried to restore order and accidentally coined what should be the ANC’s slogan as it nears its death: ‘Honourable members, it is over, it can’t continue.’
Luckily for her, however, Ramaphosa soon hit his stride, painting a beautifully blurred picture of a country in which bad things kept happening for no apparent reason. Yes, he said, all sorts of things had bent and broken because they hadn’t been maintained or because state capture had happened, but as for names and party affiliation, well, that was one of humanity’s great mysteries, like how to finish power stations on time and on budget.
“We are not a people easily resigned to our fate,” the president told a hall of people who were absolutely resigned to their fate, biting down on leather straps as they prepared for another hour of what were platitudes at best and barefaced lies at worst.
But their stupor didn’t last long as Ramaphosa revealed the first, and only, real surprise of the night: the creation of a minister of electricity, who will, depending on which pundit you ask, either streamline the rollout of private generation capacity and sideline Gwede Mantashe, or form a third and finally fatal blockage in the energy pipeline, along with those other two wads of flushed wet-wipes, the department of minerals and energy and public enterprises.
Oh, and there’s a state of disaster again, which is brilliant news for anyone who wants to disappear paper trails of things like, oh, I don’t know, Karpowerships or emergency energy procurements. But at least we’re making more drinking glasses in South Africa. The president was even drinking out of one, though if I’m honest I didn’t know Kool-Aid looked so much like water.
I suppose you live and learn. Well, not the ANC, obviously. But you know what I mean.
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