Of all the things the Big Man fears — disobedience, consequences, educated women who make eye contact — there is one terror that haunts him above all others, and in South Africa, that spectre has just become horrifyingly real. Our Big Men have been revealed as very, very small, and they are shrieking.
I understand the shock.
For years, the ANC was able to claim, without fear of contradiction, that it represented “the masses” — an overwhelming majority that had conferred on the ANC an unquestionable mandate.
It was a hugely powerful legitimising energy, and when splinter groups left, they tried to take it with them, albeit in a different shape: Julius Malema knew he didn’t have “the masses” with him when he set up shop in 2013, but by calling the EFF a “government in waiting”, he shifted focus from the present towards a future in which hypothetical masses voted for him in large numbers.
When Jacob Zuma launched his pension plan in December and called it uMkhonto we Sizwe, he went one better. By campaigning on the promise that he would change the constitution once he took power, his claim was clear: Malema might have the future, but right now, Zuma told us, MKP was backed by two-thirds of voters.
Of course, this was one of Zuma’s more modest lies: when you’ve kept repeating that God wants the ANC to rule — and that that the ANC is therefore backed not only by the masses but by all creation — a two-thirds majority feels a bit defeatist.
Still, it was a good con while it lasted.
Now, however, it’s all come crashing down, as rhetorical masses have been replaced by real mathematics.
Before May 29, people like Zuma and Malema could claim that they were the inheritors of Lumumba, Tambo and Mandela. Today we know that if the EFF and MKP combined, they would represent the will of about one in ten voting-age South Africans.
Faced with this implacable reality, the average Big Man (and they’re all very average) has two options.
The first is to take off the rented uniform, return the hydraulic lift you’ve leased from Demagogues R Us, and become a bureaucrat. Malema seems to be toying with this idea, and probably wisely: not only has the little millenarian chapel been dwarfed by the erection of Pappy Zuma’s Old Timey Jubilation Megachurch next door, but his party actually has a few leftist principles, and Zuma’s current offering — a form of feudalism — is literally what the left was invented to destroy.
This option, however, requires one to work for a living, which is why Zuma is turning to the second, where you insist that you’re still a Big Man, perhaps even bigger than before, but that this truth is being blurred by your old arch-enemy: numbers.
In short, you go the Trumpian route, complete with your very own Rudy Giuliani at your side (don’t spend it all in one place, Dali Mpofu), insisting that the election has been rigged.
It is NUMSA’s Irvin Jim, however, who’s saying the quiet part out loud.
On Sunday he called for overthrow of democracy in South Africa, tweeting that the “ANC must quickly collapse this unholy Alliance with the Racist DA before all of us get to be creative to make this country democratically ungovernable through protest and by bringing back a democratic defiance campaign where we call all the sellout [sic] by their names”.
It was bog-standard Big Man, invoking the genuine mass movement of the 1951 defiance campaign to justify his incitement to overthrow the state, an act, he explained, that would be carried out by “all of us”, which I suppose sounds better than “me and my driver Marvin as long as Marvin does all the shooting and tells me when it’s over”.
To be fair to Jim, I should point out that he seems to be a big fan of democracy in general. In 2021, for example, he tweeted “Forward with democracy for the people of Swaziland”. Likewise, last year, he tweeted his support for Brazilian president Lula, writing “Defend democracy against violence [and] the ‘acts of vandals and fascists’”.
Where he apparently draws the line, however, is when democracy happens in his own country. Then again, I’d probably hate South African democracy too if it had exposed me as cruelly as it has exposed Jim: in 2019, his new Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party proved to be slightly less popular than either the PAC or COPE — both traditional yardsticks for electoral failure — and in the local government election two years later, it won fewer than 6,000 votes. Democracy has shown Jim and Zuma what they are, and now they want revenge.
None of this is to suggest that the government of national unity is going to have it easy. Now that the Big Man fairy-dust has gone and nobody can claim any mandate from the masses, all that is left is grinding, sober governance, and even that has started on a wobbly footing as the DA reveals it is willing to let the current allegations of corruption around Phala Phala slide to make sure Cyril Ramaphosa isn’t replaced by someone far worse.
Still, as hard as it will be, doing the work of government might turn out to be easier than sustaining the vain, venal myths of the Big Men. The numbers are in, and, just maybe, their time is drawing to a close.
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