It’s odd, seeing Thabo Mbeki campaign for the ANC a year after he said he wouldn’t, but I don’t think we should judge too harshly. I mean, principles are nice to have, but to be fair, they did offer him a microphone and an audience that can’t leave until the free T-shirts have been handed out, so, you know...
Besides, it will be good for him to put on pants and get out of the house.
It’ll be even better for his audience over the last year, a depressed cat named Comrade Buttons who hates itself for staying on but, like almost everyone in the ANC, knows it would starve if it tried to make it in the real world, and so has grudgingly allowed itself to be dragged onto Mbeki’s lap every night and subjected to the latest in an endless series of lectures about garlic and beetroot.
Yes, Comrade Buttons will be thrilled that Mbeki is getting out more and inflicting his Public Intellectual ™ routine on other captive audiences for a change.
To be fair to the former president, however, it hasn’t all been revisionist claptrap about his lethally disastrous policies. Some of it has been revisionist claptrap about Jacob Zuma.
According to City Press’s Mondli Makhanya, Mbeki last week came within a libel suit’s breadth of implying that Zuma had been an apartheid agent — a kind of human landmine buried deep inside the ANC and set to explode, presumably, as soon as it came into contact with money or long numbers.
If Mbeki really believes this, and is sharing these innuendos with his confidantes, then the ramifications are huge, and not just for Comrade Buttons who will now have to listen to an entirely new genre of codswallop before he gets his revolutionary pilchard plopped down in his little dish.
For starters, imagine being one of the delegates at the Polokwane conference who voted Zuma into power in 2007.
Imagine lying awake, realising that, instead of being a skilled and ambitious politician, you were merely a mindless automaton serving the defunct apartheid regime.
How had it controlled you? Had it been something to do with the newly introduced 3G network? A microchip implanted in your brain? A braai pack implanted in your stomach?
And what of the broader repercussions? You hated how the independent press criticised Zuma throughout his rise and presidency, but given what you know now, is the South African media actually ... revolutionary?
If everything is a plot by secret meanies then nothing is your fault. If you’re in the ANC and you did wrong, it was the devil made you do it.
Yes, it can get very upsetting when you discover that it’s just apartheid agents all the way down.
That is, until you sit bolt upright in bed as Mbeki’s unifying theory of self-righteousness hits you like a thunderbolt and you realise the glorious truth: if everything is a plot by secret meanies then nothing is your fault. If you’re in the ANC and you did wrong, it was the devil made you do it.
Or, if the devil is busy, witches.
At least I’m pretty sure that’s what Fikile Mbalula told a crowd near Paarl over the weekend, explaining, in his role as secretary-general, a position he has inherited from Sol Plaatje and Oliver Tambo, that the Western Cape continues to reject ANC rule because it is run by “witches”.
Of course, Mbalula is a silly person and he might have been saying this as the sort of earnest jest beloved of those relentlessly jolly men who peaked in grade 10.
It’s also possible, however, that a small part of him believed it. And why wouldn’t he? When you’ve gone as far as he has while offering so little, why wouldn’t you believe in magic?
When it comes to magical thinking, however, Mbalula looks like a steely pragmatist next to the fantasists in Luthuli House who are allegedly leaning on South African diplomats abroad to help convince expatriates to vote for the ANC.
Of course it goes without saying that this would be illegal: diplomats work for the state, not political parties.
It also goes without saying that the ANC hasn’t done its sums. If it had, it would know that the total number of eligible South African voters spread around the globe — the electoral mother lode the party is so desperate to woo that it is allegedly telling ambassadors to break the law of the country they represent — is about 70,000.
If the turnout on May 29 is similar to 2019’s, that’s about one-and-a-half parliamentary seats, which, if there are ANC buttocks on them, represents the smallest theoretical unit of leadership and service delivery known to physics, or roughly one soggy matchbox filled with dandruff.
But where it gets really silly is when you think for a moment about who, exactly, these ambassadors and high commissioners are supposed to be wooing, and it occurs to you that South African expats fall overwhelmingly into two camps: people paid by the government or its cronies, or people who are trying to get as far away from the government and its cronies as they can without emigrating.
In other words, if true, the ANC’s cunning plan is to ask diplomats to break the law to sell the ANC either to people who are definitely going to vote for it already, or to people who will see said sales pitch as yet more proof of why they will never vote for the ANC.
Hang in there, Comrade Buttons. This too shall pass.
