Cyril Ramaphosa’s decision to run down the clock on Jacob Zuma’s sentence was legal. When it is challenged in the courts, pundits tell us, it might also be proved rational. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to know it was also politically necessary and therefore inevitable.
I understand the anger of South Africans who believe Ramaphosa has staged a sort of bureaucratic jailbreak, drilling through the wall of Cell Block D and allowing 9,486 other convicts to skedaddle into the night just so Zuma can hightail it home to Nkandla.
I think many people in this country believe Zuma will never serve time for anything related to state capture and in their desire to see justice done have piled unrealistic and, perhaps, unreasonable expectations on his 15-month sentence for contempt of court, feeling, on some level, it should be a sort of substitute sentence, a years-long incarceration to make up for the verdict unlikely to arrive before Zuma’s death.
None of this, however, has any basis in law. According to the legal minds hastily dragged into TV studios at the weekend, nothing unconstitutional has happened. Zuma was released because, like his 9,486 fellow inmates, he had 12 months taken off his sentence; and he was eligible for that reduction because he is an elderly, low-risk inmate who has been deemed unlikely to offend again.
On this last count, I must respectfully disagree with my learned and infinitely more qualified friends. Zuma was sentenced for contempt of court and I can think of few people more likely to hold our courts in contempt in the coming years.
Still, as explained by various pundits, the whole point of having laws is to prevent societies descending into chaos and in this respect Ramaphosa seems to have understood springing Zuma was his least bad option, especially in that part of the year in which Zuma’s supporters traditionally celebrate his untouchability with a festival of truck burning.
Some might argue using the law to defer a thinly veiled threat of violence, without tackling the source of the threat, isn’t different to paying off the local heavy when he arrives in your bakery, spits his tobacco juice on the floor and says, “Nice little province you got here. Pity if something were to happen to it.”
Ramaphosa, however, has neither the time nor the mandate to go all Elliot Ness. There’s an election coming and what he needs most is the illusion of contentment and continuity, something he’s proving willing to buy it at an astonishing cost.
Today, no rational South African expects the ANC to build hospitals or run public transport systems or fix the roads. All we ask, now, is that it rebuilds hospitals once they get burnt down or keeps the last few trains running, at least some of the time, or tries not to hollow out systems so completely that major roads in central Johannesburg blow up.
In 2019, a Public Access to Information Act request forced Eskom to admit it had spent R33bn on diesel to keep the lights on between March 2013 and March 2016.
This was the heyday of state capture, so we can’t be sure all of it ended up in Eskom’s gas turbine generators, or that it was even diesel. Given the sort of creatures who regularly serviced the court of our giggling Sun King, I can easily imagine Eskom paying a few hundred million for 30 barrels of lukewarm Fanta.
Still, the point is spending R11bn a year on diesel was considered a minor scandal in 2019.
Today, those figures make Eskom and the ANC government look like an Icelandic eco-village built on a geothermal vent. During the past financial year, Eskom incinerated R21bn, and at the current rate of conflagration, it is comfortably on track to spend north of R30bn this year.
It’s a scandal that dwarfs the profligacy of Zuma’s Eskom. And yet to Ramaphosa the cost of that fuel, and a few squawks from the bourgeoisie about Zuma’s entirely legal release, are a small price to pay to conjure the illusions necessary for the ANC to win next year’s election.
At this point in the history of liberal democracy in South Africa, governance isn’t measured by whether good things are happening today and might continue to happen tomorrow. Instead, it is measured by whether things are going substantially and alarmingly worse than yesterday.
This is the politics of zero expectation, seeded by the immense contempt of colonialism, nurtured by apartheid, which systemically tried to teach black South Africans to expect nothing from their rulers, before being picked up 15 years ago by our present absentee slumlords.
Today, no rational South African expects the ANC to build hospitals or run public transport systems or fix the roads. All we ask, now, is that it rebuilds hospitals once they get burnt down or keeps the last few trains running, at least some of the time, or tries not to hollow out systems so completely that major roads in central Johannesburg blow up.
Ramaphosa understands this. He understands insurrection and stage 6 load-shedding may lose the ANC its majority next year. But Zuma whisked away from drive-through prison, and stage 3, alternating with stage 1, well, that’s something different, bringing with it the fragile sense that tomorrow might not be worse than yesterday; that nothing is burning except money and at least it’s keeping businesses open and people in work.
Yes, I think Ramaphosa knows there’s only one way to win next year, and that is to buy victory, one barrel of diesel at a time, then send us the bill.
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