When Deputy President Paul Mashatile quietly collapsed during a speech in Tzaneen on Friday, first swaying gently and then subsiding out of sight behind the podium like the ANC after an election, nobody seemed particularly bothered.
To watch the video is to see a man desperately alone: after recommitting himself to ending poverty by 2030, he stands, silent, confused and swaying slightly for a full 14 seconds before he slurs his way through the same sentence again and then goes down by the stern.
I understand why his security detail didn’t react during that interminable, ominous pause — they needed to be scanning the crowd for the next person they were going to force off the highway and beat bloody — but couldn’t someone else have stepped up and asked our national No 2 if he was alright?
Then again, perhaps it’s understandable. In those 14 seconds, Mashatile’s expression was one of grim, slightly aghast resignation, and perhaps his audience thought he’d finally seen clearly the ANC he helps lead and his role in its collapse and had decided the most honourable way out of it was to fake his own death and try to crawl out of the back of the tent.
Perhaps they simply heard an ANC politician vowing to end poverty within the next six years and assumed Mashatile had been crushed under the weight of his own bullshit.
Since then it’s all been explained away, the way the ANC used to explain away David Mabuza going to Russia to have his bolts tightened. It was hot, we’ve been told, and Mashatile had a touch of food poisoning the day before.
For a few seconds on Friday, however, there would have been genuine panic in the ANC as it saw its life flashing before its rheumy eyes.
Before the general election, Cyril Ramaphosa and Mashatile were a president and his deputy. Now, they are less a pair of politicians than one of those sad cases you see in David Attenborough documentaries, where the last breeding pair of some over-specialised sea bird is guarded by scientists in a climate-controlled habitat and fed its disastrously specific diet — algae from the sea bed, the vapour from the top of cumulus clouds and large bundles of undeclared dollars — as the inevitable end marches closer.
Yes, Mashatile is the end of the line for the ANC and on Friday that end seemed to lurch alarmingly closer, albeit for a moment.
With all due respect to Mashatile, I’m not sure anybody else really cared.
Not that anyone wishes him ill, of course, but I suspect we’ve started feeling the slightly anaesthetising effect of a government of national unity (GNU) — a thing designed to blur the individual identities and muffle the internal dramas of the parties it comprises.
At least, that’s the impression from the outside. For those serving the government and their parties, it’s a different story. The 2026 local government elections are coming fast and when they arrive every member of the GNU will need to produce two sets of receipts; the first proving any GNU successes were largely thanks to their own party and the second proving any GNU failures were the fault of the other lot.
This is why the current power plays are so fascinating, like watching a pair of castaways rowing towards a distant ship, each trying not to let the other see they’re secretly stretching out a toe towards the only lifebelt.
Yes, it’s a tricky dance, but it must go on until the music stops, no matter how many times the dancers tread on each other’s toes
So far Ramaphosa seems the most comfortable, perhaps because he has finally found a form of presidency he is good at and enjoys: that of union leader and chief negotiator.
John Steenhuisen, however, also seems to be trying to keep up with the GNU’s new, flexible, often intangible demands. Firing his racist and homophobic edgelord chief of staff was clearly done under duress, but he managed to smile and nod his way through an official visit to China without raising a peep about Taiwan or the ANC’s official policy that it isn’t a country. Perhaps he’s been told there is no “I” in “Team”. Or, if he doesn’t carry his end, there will be no “John” in “DA leader”.
The trouble for Steenhuisen and Ramaphosa is co-operation is a whisker away from complicity — or, far worse to the dogmatic rumps of both parties, impotence.
On Sunday City Press spoke to unnamed malcontents in the DA who fretted that Steenhuisen’s decision to trundle blithely over his own “red lines” such as NHI and the Bela Bill reduced the DA to being little more than ANC’s “lapdog”.
Of course, you’ll read exactly the same thing from many ANC supporters, who will tell you with equal fervour that Ramaphosa has been conned into servitude by Helen Zille.
Certainly the City Press headline claiming Ramaphosa had “buckled under pressure” exerted by AfriForum and Solidarity on the Bela Bill will have given considerable aid and comfort to Jacob Zuma and his supporters, who have for years been trying to paint Ramaphosa as a puppet of the apartheid regime and its ideological inheritors.
Yes, it’s a tricky dance, but it must go on until the music stops, no matter how many times the dancers tread on each other’s toes.
Now, can someone please get the Veep a glass of water?
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