TOM EATON

After weeks of wondering who would be inside the tent and who would be left out in the cold, we finally know: a second tent has been bought at vast expense and stapled to the first, with three dozen extra tentlets huddled up against both for all the deputies, and a sleeping bag outside for when Patricia de Lille needs somewhere to go and have a little cry.

In some respects, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government of national unity and personal impunity represents startling change. In others, however, it remains relentlessly familiar.

The decision to take higher education away from Blade Nzimande but to keep him on as minister of science, technology and innovation, for example, is vintage ANC, as he prepares to spend the next five years cutting ribbons in front of gadgets he doesn’t understand, designed by graduates of universities he did his best to wreck, paid for by people he regards as ideological enemies.

Keeping De Lille in the cabinet, likewise, despite her GOOD party being obliterated at the polls, seems in keeping with the ANC’s views on consequences. After all, 29,500 votes are less a mandate to be in government than the sort of thing you see when you look through a microscope at a droplet of water: the little figures jiggling this way and that might be very enthusiastic, but they are very, very small.

In her defence as tourism minister, however, I would point out that De Lille has visited every corner of our beautiful land, usually as a member of whichever political party she had joined that week; and her border fence confirmed her as someone much keener on inviting people into South Africa than keeping them out.

Gayton McKenzie, too, seems at first glance a controversial choice for minister of sport, art and culture, and his appointment must have made many local artists wonder, yet again, why the ANC hates the arts so much. Was it all those depressing novels they had to read in Afrikaans, where the hero can’t compete in the athletics day because his mother is having a kidney transplant?

I don’t know. But with all due respect to the rock-bottom morale of South Africa's creative people, I do know that McKenzie’s appointment isn’t going to hurt the arts in this country very much more than they’ve already been hurt, mostly because when you drive over a dead squirrel the squirrel doesn’t get more dead.

And who knows? Perhaps it’s all part of some bigger plan.

In a tweet on Monday, McKenzie told his critics that, despite their efforts to “block” his “rise”, he was living proof that “your destiny is in the hands of God”.

If this is true, and God is organising the universe to arrange that certain people become cabinet ministers and that other people become deputy ministers, perhaps because they didn’t pray quite as hard, then I will stop being a doubting Thomas and wait for the first scandals to drop.

At the risk of angering the primal forces of creation, however, it does seem to me that some of Ramaphosa’s cabinet has been appointed for reasons less to do with divine destiny than political pragmatism, or, in some cases, short-circuiting criticism.

There was a sharp-edged elegance in the promotion of Leon Schreiber to minister of home affairs: what better way to silence — or at least exhaust — one of your loudest and harshest critics than by burying him under that vast, broken machine and telling him: if you’re so clever, how about you show us how it’s done?

Julius Malema was predictably apoplectic about this and similar appointments, tweeting on Sunday that the ANC had betrayed “generations before us” and that it was time to resist. I suppose that’s what happens when you get excluded from a government that represents almost 70 percent of the people who voted: you have to pretend that democracy has been usurped, to distract your followers from the fact that you’ve just become the Pepsi to Jacob Zuma’s Coke.

For the rest, however, the response to the new cabinet has been thoughtfully muted, appropriate, perhaps, for a country trying to catch up with a historic lurch towards something completely new.

Each day seems to bring some small but potent revelation about who we are and what we want. We are learning as we go, not just about theoretical politics but our learned responses to it.

As the negotiations dragged on, some pundits fretted about the egos of our politicians. But I think that we, the voters, will also need to confront similar things in ourselves. ANC voters will have to understand that their party is dying and needs help. Opposition voters will have to stop playing the political version of fantasy football, where you know all the answers and play a perfect game on paper, and start learning about the compromises required by real government.

Perhaps most difficult of all, opposition voters will have to apply the same standards to their elected officials as they have applied to the ANC for so long.

This will be difficult, not least because there may be a great deal of spoiling and finger-pointing in this huge, unwieldy, ideologically fractured cabinet, and voters my struggle to distinguish between slow progress and grinding ineptitude.

But I have faith in us. After all, if Blade Nzimande and Gayton McKenzie can be ministers of state, then anyone can do anything.