TOM EATON | There’s plenty to blame apartheid for, a lack of authentic democracy and public service for starters

It’s rare for a ruling party to launch its election campaign by admitting that it is entirely out of its depth, implicitly begging voters to put it out of its misery at the polls, but then the ANC is no ordinary party.

Of course, I understand what Cyril Ramaphosa was going for as he told the press that he had some regrets about his presidency. He sometimes saunas with people who have summered with people who have accidentally made eye contact with people who work for a living, and he has no doubt heard rumours that these working people like it when presidents pretend to echo their disappointments.

In this case, however, it fell as flat as talking about how proud you are of the Zondo commission while sitting in the same room as Gwede Mantashe and Nomvula Mokonyane, both implicated by said commission.

“What I am not proud of,” he explained, “is the way we did not anticipate that there would be corruption as we dispersed personal protective equipment. That depressed me.”

What depressed me, on the other hand, was another reminder that we have a president who is either a habitual liar or who has the mental capacity of a periwinkle.

I mean, if you genuinely couldn’t figure out what would happen when you handed billions of rand to the same people who were still wiping their chins after a decade of state capture, then you shouldn’t be trusted to feed yourself with metal cutlery let alone head a government.

Clearly, however, this is not the case. Ramaphosa can use metal cutlery without stabbing himself in the eye, and he and his coterie absolutely knew what was going to happen. It’s just that lying to us now is much less costly to him than trying to stop the looting in 2020 would have been.

That low cost-per-lie is why he chose to repeat another absolute porker on the weekend, namely, that South Africa doesn’t have enough town planners because of apartheid.

When he said more or less the same thing back in November, insisting that the country doesn’t have enough “qualified” town planners, some might have given him the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps suspecting that Ramaphosa was speaking from ignorance rather than malice, many of the country’s highly qualified town planners quickly nipped away from teaching English in China or au pairing in Dubai to write op eds and social media posts in an attempt to educate the president.

Perhaps, they told themselves, Ramaphosa was simply repeating what he’d been told when he asked his courtiers how his new smart city was coming along. Had they sunk the foundations for the bullet train yet? No, sire, for the town planners are unruly and will not stay with their studies ...

Perhaps suspecting that Ramaphosa was speaking from ignorance rather than malice, many of the country’s highly qualified town planners quickly nipped away from teaching English in China or au pairing in Dubai to write op eds and social media posts in an attempt to educate the president.

The problem, they explained, wasn’t a lack of town planners but rather a lack of towns to plan. Some wrote of being retrenched or simply ignored by the state, as Ramaphosa’s government resolutely refused to tackle apartheid spatial planning or even the basic demands of a growing population.

Unfortunately, town planners seem to be a very polite group — they have, after all, dedicated their lives to social harmony — and their protests were easy to ignore. Certainly, when Ramaphosa chose to libel them again on the weekend, he knew there would be almost no blowback.

If he’d stopped there, it would all be forgotten now; just another example of his dismal leadership and the ANC’s refusal to accept responsibility for anything. But by publicly blaming a fictitious shortage of town planners on apartheid, Ramaphosa invoked a larger historical picture, and in so doing, demanded that we look back at what he and his party have done these past few decades.

To be clear, I believe that it is correct to blame many of our current crises on apartheid and the systems of legislated oppression that preceded it. No society can bootstrap or Rainbow Nation or free market its way past the Land Act or the Group Areas Act. Ask any one of our thousands of unemployed town planners, and they will tell you how oppressive ideology is still carved into our urban spaces and still keeps South Africans poor and in danger.

I would even go so far as to suggest that when Lindiwe Zulu caused outrage by saying that the horrific Marshalltown fire was the fault of apartheid, she was partially right.

It was apartheid, after all, that chose to continue down the path of its autocratic predecessors, and which therefore dictated the form of the regime that would replace it; not a government of bureaucrats but a liberation movement, steeped in a culture of putting cadres above competence, and unable to move past its deep suspicion of commerce and private enterprise.

It’s because of apartheid that we aren’t now 75 years into a relationship with democracy and public service that would make the continued employment of people like Zulu — or, indeed, Ramaphosa — unthinkable.

Yes, one can blame plenty on apartheid.

But when Ramaphosa asks us to believe that the ANC government hasn’t been able to train a few thousand town planners over the course of 30 years, he is asking us to believe that it doesn’t know how to run a country and that it has no plans to learn. He is telling us that he and his party are done. And that, I can believe.