I’ve been told that year-end work functions can be awkward. I wouldn’t know: as a freelance writer, my year-end function is where I see that it’s year-end and continue to function. But for our politicians, the next few weeks are going to be fraught with social peril.
Imagine, for example, the stilted conversation and careful avoiding of eye contact that’s going to happen at the Patriotic Alliance’s Christmas knees-up, as members try not to bring up their attempt, earlier this year, to change the name of Beaufort West to Dubai West.
Of course, changing words on signs is now a legitimate form for service delivery in South Africa, and it was quite a sweet attempt at making good on party leader Gayton McKenzie’s promise to turn the Karoo town into our version of an emirate.
And, to be fair, it wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Dubai’s iconic skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, isn’t connected to a sewage system — the Number Twos of the One Percent are whisked away by a convoy of trucks — which means that it is, essentially, the world’s largest porta-potty. McKenzie and the PA could easily have put up a few plastic ablutions and claimed that they were plumbed no worse than one of the world’s most exclusive spots.
Still, I suspect things have been fairly strained since McKenzie had to apologise for his former mayor’s foray into revisionist geography. We can only hope that between now and the Christmas party nobody in the PA accidentally opens an encyclopedia and discovers that Beaufort West is south of Dubai, not west of it, or the evening might go for from fraught to downright frosty.
Most of the EFF, too, is likely to spend the festive season in a slough of despond, brooding over recent polls that suggest that the party might get 15% next year, a rate of growth which guarantees them a clear majority just as Julius Malema turns 78.
Of course, that was always his plan — imagine spending half a century pulling in a big salary and bigger crowds, and all you ever have to do is shout at people every so often and make sure you never win and election so you don’t have to run anything — but still, I can imagine more than a few long faces over the festive bottles of Rupert & Rothschild this year.
Recent polls that suggest that the party might get 15% percent next year, a rate of growth which guarantees them a clear majority just as Julius Malema turns 78.
At least the PA and EFF have somewhere to celebrate, unlike the poor ANC, which on Monday had to stand and watch as a sheriff of Gauteng high court rifled through Luthuli House looking for assets to seize.
It was a waste of the sheriff’s time, of course — the ANC’s last real assets retired or died years ago — but that will be small consolation to the cadres who are now drawing straws to see which of them will have to sidle up to Comrade Cyril at the punch bowl and ask him if he might consider donating 24 hours’ worth of interest on his current account in case they have to buy a new building.
To be fair, not all the comrades are surrendering to despair.
Consider Karabo Rakgolela, GM of the Lethabo power station, who told the Sunday Times that South Africa had recently gone back to stage 6 load-shedding because there had been a heatwave and “the entire affluent South Africa switches on their air-conditioning and fans”.
On the surface it was boilerplate buck-passing. After all, when you start claiming that the problem is entirely reasonable demand rather than an ever-shrinking supply, you must eventually reach a point where you have to blame the country’s last illuminated light bulb for crashing the national grid.
What Rakgolela perhaps didn’t realise, however, was that when he described people with fans as affluent, he was single-handedly opening up an entirely new tax bracket for the ANC to plunder, ranging from the upper-middle class with their little plastic desk fans right up to the oligarchs, boasting oscillating standing fans from Makro that can waft affluence from one side of a small room to another. Fan-tax-tic!
Certainly, Rakgolela’s breakthrough will provide some relief to those ANC cadres who had been handed the 450 petrol generators donated by China and told to flog them on Facebook Marketplace.
No political year-end party, however, is likely to be harder to navigate than that of the DA, which revealed over the weekend that it has had informal talks with businessman Roger Jardine — you know Roger? Roger Jardine? From that thing? — to possibly be parachuted in as leader of its Multi-Party Coalition and, if all goes very well, to be inaugurated at the Union Buildings next year as President Not John Steenhuisen.
Indeed, according to the Sunday Times, “powerful financial backers” are “insisting” that the MPC be led by a candidate with “the necessary gravitas and credentials”, which is likely to make it a very subdued evening of bingo and classic liberalism down at the bowls club, with nervous supporters picking their moment to pull Steenhuisen aside and whisper, “I don’t care what anyone says — I think you’ve definitely got the necessary gravitas and — well, the necessary gravitas”.
Yes, a long and difficult year is drawing to a close, but as you stand in the corner of the office, holding your drink and willing your boss not to come and talk to you, remember: it could always be worse. Your boss could be Cyril Ramaphosa.
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