When President Cyril Ramaphosa is presented with the 2022 census this afternoon, he will be brimming with questions. How can there be so many people in the country when he sees so few of them at the club? Did their membership lapse? Where do they summer? And what is this “employment” thing that keeps being mentioned?
I’m being unkind, of course. Ramaphosa is much more in touch with the people than I’ve implied, often spending his afternoons watching them from his balcony in Camps Bay as they sit in traffic far below in their overheating Ferraris or trudge glumly behind their French bulldogs. He sees them: the ordinary folk; the ones who don’t get invited to Davos and have to spend their skiing holidays one town; the real Himalayan salt of the earth.
Yes, the census results will be fascinating and illuminating. But sometimes you don’t need millions of data points to see who a people are. Sometimes you can just listen to former chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng on one of his metaphysical benders.
Over the weekend, the man who told us that Covid-19 vaccines were developed by Satan and that he won’t criticise Israel in case the God of the Old Testament smites him told eNCA that same god will make him president one of these days.
I especially like the bit where God tells some poor MP to vacate their seat and then everybody votes as if the outcome might be in question
To be clear, that wasn’t the revealing part. This, after all, is a country whose previous president often told us that the ANC had a divine mandate and would rule until Jesus returned.
What was telling, however, was Mogoeng’s insistence that democracy would have no part in God’s plan. When God makes him president, he explained, “he doesn’t want it to happen through an electoral process. He doesn’t want me to join a political party ... It is going to be miraculous”.
When asked how, exactly, God would stage this heavenly coup and establish a South African theocracy, Mogoeng was ready. It was possible, he said, that parliament might reach a stalemate over which of the politicians to elect as president, at which point God would “touch them and say, ‘There is a man here who is not in any political structure ... Go to that man ... Let him take a seat. Somebody vacate the seat. Let him come in. Vote him into the position’.”
It’s always fascinating to get a glimpse into the fantasy worlds of other people, but Mogoeng’s seems delightfully coherent for a judge who is also a religious fundamentalist, featuring a deity who is both omnipotent and vengeful but also quite a stickler for bureaucratic process. I especially like the bit where God tells some poor MP to vacate their seat and then everybody votes as if the outcome might be in question.
It sounds properly unhinged, but then again, I would argue that Mogoeng is simply reading the room.
Increasingly, we live in a world in which people feel that politics is either broken or actively working against them. Populists have understood that the old lies will no longer work, and so, instead of promising to mend politics, they’ve started promising to end it.
Ten months ago, Donald Trump called for parts of the US constitution to be suspended in support of his endlessly debunked lie about election fraud. Today, he leads his nearest Republican rival by at least 40 percentage points. His followers — and, I suspect, hundreds of millions of people in other parts of the world — don’t want better, cleaner politics. They want no politics.
I understand the emotional logic, and the smug complacency of the political mainstream seems to confirm it: facing the potential death of American democracy, the Democrats remain adamant that their most electable candidate is a house plant.
Yes, I understand. But who runs countries if there are no politicians? Priests and kings.
The census will tell us that South Africans want jobs, security and education. But Mogoeng has also reminded us that we want miracles: the old South African weakness for the quick fix, the 30% return on the Ponzi, the charismatic hustler in the red beret.
Can we learn? Or will we just pull that lever again — and pray?
All of which is why Songezo Zibi and his Rise Mzansi movement are up against it.
Over the weekend, the new party gathered to publish a “people’s declaration” outlining its vision for a reimagined kind of politics in South Africa. It was clearly a happy and inspiring event, seeming to combine the earnestness and technocratic thoroughness of the ANC in the 1950s with a more modern sensibility that understands how suspicious and jaded the average voter is.
Certainty, Zibi has been at pains to explain that his party is not going to be making those same, hollow promises. Six months ago he wrote that “no-one is coming to save us” and that there would be “no perfect politics”.
It’s honest. It’s timely. But I fear it’s also facing our national addiction to the political jackpot — this fantasy so many of us seem to have where if we just pull the right lever often enough, three pineapples will line up on the screen and all that economic growth and transparency and service delivery will come pouring out.
What Zibi is trying to introduce is the hard, unglamorous work of civics — of doing the thing because it is necessary, rather than because it is lucrative or self-aggrandising or embarrasses our political opponents.
Can we learn? Or will we just pull that lever again — and pray?
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