While we all respect the notoriety of lies, damned lies and statistics, I humbly submit that there is nothing more worthy of extreme caution — or even outright suspicion — than most of the so-called news coming out of the negotiations to form a government of national unity.
This is not to say that the negotiators have been lying to us. Most are, I imagine, playing their cards extremely close to their chests, keeping the volatile energies of power sealed behind closed doors and away from the incendiary sparks and oxygen of public debate.
Nevertheless, these are all extremely canny operators, and some of them are masters of curating perception, not above leaking the odd scrap of context-free information to make themselves look like patriotic pragmatists struggling against intransigent spoilers.
Add these potentially dubious titbits to a media cycle thrusting microphones into the faces of anyone who once brushed against a politics degree, and then filter the whole thing through Twitter, where GNU rejects EFF and MKP seethe and fantasise, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m excessively cautious in any claims I make here.
Having said all that, however, I think it’s fair to suggest that, at least at the time of writing on Monday evening, the birthing of our new government seemed to have slowed.
Weekend headlines screamed “Deadlock!”, quoting whispers about allegations about possible irreconcilable differences over certain ministries, and on Monday I read about stand-offs and knife edges as Twitter’s hyperbole needle twitched into the red.
Again, however, it was unclear whether the wheels have started coming off or whether this is just what happens when a once-great but now bankrupt corporation merges with an accounting firm, a church, a panel-beater that may or may not be a money-laundering operation, a small NGO, and a couple of corner cafes.
I’m not even sure I believe the narrative that slowed negotiations imply failed negotiations. After all, great negotiators get what they want, and if they’re up against equally skilled opponents, there should be no easy victories.
The psychological landscape alone must be fascinatingly new and complex, as I think we glimpsed on Monday when Gauteng Premier and collateral damage Panyaza Lesufi told eNCA that talks with the DA at provincial level had been ‘annoying’.
Of course it’s possible that the DA team across the table from Lesufi was being obstructionist. But we also know that when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like persecution, and when you’re the man who spent R431m on sanitising schools, kept your job, led the Gauteng branch of your party to its worst ever electoral defeat, and kept your job again, you surely exist in a world of such vast professional privilege, so far from anything that looks like competition or compromise, that basic reality must seem ‘annoying’.
Lesufi is by no means the most cosseted ANC cadre, and it might be even worse for some of his colleagues. After 30 years of unchallenged power, during which they’ve slowly spun themselves a cocoon of Marie Antoinette-like untouchability, merely having to consider someone else’s opinion must feel like being forced to kiss their hem.
Even among those remaining ANC figures who are unhappy about the party’s ostentatious misuse of power, there must be a sense that something subtly unfair is happening. I can easily imagine sitting there as an elderly stalwart, my memories of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as clear as if it happened yesterday, looking at my 40 percent in this election — almost twice the size of the next-largest party — and wondering why, exactly, it doesn’t entitle me to call most of the shots.
If it is true that the ANC is refusing to consider replacing Paul Mashatile as vice-president, however, then this particular tussle is surely less about fairness than raw, basic survival.
To the DA and many other opposition parties, Mashatile represents the worst of the new ANC; somebody who needs to be discarded, and quickly, if the country is going to progress.
To the ANC, however, faced with electoral oblivion in five years, Mashatile isn’t just another cadre to be managed. Fikile Mbalula may emerge from the current negotiations as a more respectable figure within the party, but the succession plan is desperately clear: after Ramaphosa there is only one person who has the suits and faintly confused effect required to lead the party in a general election, and that is Paul Mashatile. There is simply nobody else.
Of course I’m not suggesting that Mashatile is somebody. He’s not. The ANC might see him as a kind of baby Superman, a last hope to be protected at all costs and launched into space as the Planet Klepton implodes under the weight of its own sleaze, but this is a Superman whose only power is to be somewhere else. ‘Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, I said look up, not at those bodyguards assaulting that motorist ...’
Still, the alternatives are unthinkable for Ramaphosa’s dying party. Should Mashatile be fired now, he will drift away towards more lucrative employment, and in 2029 the ANC’s presidential candidate will be whoever was dawdling on the loo, looking at their phone, when the sheriff of the court came and chained the front doors of Luthuli House shut for the last time.
No wonder they’re fighting to keep him. Allegedly, that is ...
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