TOM EATON | Zuma’s fight with the ANC — or lessons on what you can and can’t do with cake

As Jacob Zuma fights his expulsion from the ANC, it seems a good moment to talk briefly about cake, and what you can and can’t do with it.

I’ll get to Zuma in a moment, but first let me ask you a question: why do we say you can’t have your cake and eat it?

After all, you have to have your cake before you can eat it. I mean, if you don’t have it, you can’t eat it.

So yes: you most definitely can have your cake and eat it.

But what you can’t do is eat your cake and have it, too.

That’s the original form of the cake-eating saying, by the way, from back before it got swapped around and blurred, and I think nice and clear: you can’t eat a piece of cake and continue to have possession of that piece of cake.

Of course, even though it has been twisted around, you can still catch the general gist of the new version. Because that’s how meaning is made: people repeat things over and over again, and even if the individual words are a bit vague, and the internal logic is a bit fuzzy, we understand what they’re trying to say. It’s one of humanity’s great gifts.

It is, however, also one of our great flaws; because when someone comes along and repeats pure nonsense over and over again, we often tend to believe that it must have some logic or even common sense to it. Hell, almost the whole advertising industry is based on that premise.

Which brings us back to Jacob Zuma, fighting to stay a member of the ANC even though his uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party contested the May elections against the ANC.

Clearly, the former president is trying to eat his cake and still have it, perhaps because he understands people and knows that if he keeps saying that he should remain an ANC member, many of his followers will think, “Well, the logic doesn’t really work, but Msholozi keeps saying it, so it must be true.”

For many others, however, the garbled logic is too much to swallow. After all, how can someone demand to remain a board-member of Acme Corporation when they’ve just started company called The Sworn Enemy of Acme Corporation’?

The answer, I suspect, is that, at least to Zuma, they’re not different corporations.

Instead, Zuma’s current legal argument suggests that he sees MKP not as a separate party but as a kind of emergency committee of the ANC, hastily formed to save the ANC from itself. Or, to use a different analogy, an escape pod blasting off from a conquered planet, to be flown to safety behind a nearby moon so that our heroes can regroup, recruit reinforcements, and take back the planet.

Of course, in this case the heroes on the escape pod aren’t interested in actually governing the planet once they retake it — life’s way too short for that kind of nonsense, especially when you’ve got all those mines to plunder — but still, you get the picture.

When Julius Malema was expelled from the ANC, some pundits speculated that his ultimate fantasy would be to return to it, either as a conqueror or as a saviour. I suspect the same now holds true for Zuma.

Yes, Number One wants to eat his cake and still have it. And why wouldn’t he, when he lives in a world in which everything is cake?