TOM EATON

The Electoral Commission of South Africa demanding punitive damages from Jacob Zuma’s MK Party will be annoying to the former president, and not only because Mzwanele Manyi will now have to fire up the photocopier and print another 10,000 copies of Zuma’s book to hawk out of the boot of his car.

No, Zuma will be annoyed because the longer the IEC keeps litigating, the less effective his Big Lie becomes.

Politicians have always lied, but it was the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, both fascist and communist, that mainstreamed the gigantic, irresistible, self-propagating lie

That lie, you might recall, is the one that Zuma and his cronies started telling even as the polls closed on May 29, claiming that they had heaps of rock-solid evidence that the election had been rigged and MKP had been robbed.

Of course, the moment the IEC asked to see that evidence it turned out to be just like Schabir Shaik’s terminal disease: non-existent.

This was the cue for most voters (and some pundits) to shrug and forget about the whole thing, chalking it up to just another scheme by the scamps who brought us the Guptas and state capture.

The IEC, however, refused to let it go, because it understands Zuma’s long game and the corrosive power of a lie.

Politicians have always lied, but it was the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, both fascist and communist, that mainstreamed the gigantic, irresistible, self-propagating lie — a lie that was palpably absurd and easily debunked with facts but which, by mixing it with the public’s pre-existing psychological weaknesses and biases and by endlessly repeating it, came to be accepted by millions as irrefutable truth.

“The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”

That translation was written in 1939, but the methods outlined in it would be familiar to anyone following the news over the past decade, especially in the US since 2020, where tens of millions of Americans now believe that the 2020 election was rigged, that US Christians are being persecuted, that Donald Trump is a competent businessman and that Democrats are radical leftists — all of which have no basis in reality.

This brings us back to Zuma, and why the IEC keeps dragging his lie to court.

Of course, it has certain legal responsibilities. It can’t simply let the matter slide. But I think the IEC also understands that when Zuma cried foul and accused the IEC of running a rigged poll, he wasn’t trying to overturn the 2024 election.

He was trying to overturn the 2029 election.

He was sowing a crop he perhaps still hopes to reap five years from now, planting the seeds, those “few bare essentials” he wanted “persistently repeated”, so that they could grow and flower into his Big Lie: that the IEC is corrupt and biased against the MKP, and therefore any election it presides over, and any election MKP doesn’t win, is automatically illegitimate.

This is why the IEC has dug in its heels, first demanding evidence, and then, when MKP feared exposure and tried to withdraw its case, dragging it back to court.

It understands that Zuma’s lie must not only be exposed but exploded, as loudly, publicly and protractedly as possible; that every hour Zuma and MKP sit in court, being told to provide evidence they don’t have, is another day, or another week, or even another month, in which the Big Lie fails to take root, and in which our democracy is slightly safer.