TOM EATON

We’re all still easing into 2025 so it was kind of Paul Mashatile to orchestrate such an accessible, on-the-nose metaphor for the ANC’s decline as he did this week, inviting himself into a Khayelitsha woman’s home to use her as a prop before his enormous entourage allegedly blocked the woman’s son from entering his own home and the whole shameful lot of them were thrown out o,n to the street by the furious resident.

To his credit, Mashatile responded as any respectable politician should, apologising before pivoting into some robust bashing of the DA.

Still, it takes a certain je ne sais quoi to go flesh-pressing in a part of Cape Town in which you won over 65% of the vote last year and in which the DA barely got above 5% and not only manage to turn a standard photo-op into a fiasco that evoked memories of your bullying goon squad but also teed up Helen Zille to go onto X and bang out a stream of widely publicised tweets highlighting DA policies and projects in Cape Town’s poorer areas.

It was a demoralising moment for the party in the Western Cape, coming, as it did, just a day after the ANC in Mpumalanga told the Cape Town comrades that it wouldn’t be coming to the party’s big birthday bash because the stadium in Khayelitsha is too small.

And fair enough. The whole point of going to events like this is to be buoyed up by the euphoria of standing among tens of thousands of people, all basking in the glow of revolutionary solidarity and all revelling in the ANC’s version of the Spiderman motto: with great power comes fokol responsibility.

I mean, no self-respecting political rent-a-crowd gets out of bed for anything less than a 10,000-seater, and according to reports the Khayelitsha venue can host only about 2,000 people, barely enough to squeeze more than few dribbles of comradely endorphins out of your average attendee.

Still, as the ANC leaks voters faster than the EFF leaks leaders, you’d have thought that it might throw some major cash at the event, but there was even worse news, this time from Fikile Mbalula.

“We don’t have money,” explained Mbaks with admirable forthrightness. “We are not a rich political party.”

What he meant, of course, was that, now that all the truly talented extractors of cash have scampered away towards Nkandla and most of the Russian oligarchs have had to downsize, the ANC has finally started budgeting.

What he meant, of course, was that, now that all the truly talented extractors of cash have scampered away towards Nkandla and most of the Russian oligarchs have had to downsize, the ANC has finally started budgeting.

The trouble for the party’s bean counters, however, is that the show must go on, and the ANC has decided that it must go on in the Western Cape, a province that, at least in ANC terms, is a foreign and slightly hostile country and is therefore the perfect place to go and stage a performance of strength and unity. It’s the same reason new presidents go on international tours as soon as possible: speechifying from your base is well and good, but doing it far away from your ideological and political home makes you look like a much more serious and impressive specimen.

In other words, the ANC isn’t in Cape Town to win votes. (Even it wanted to, it knows it can’t: support for the party in Western Cape has more than halved since 1999).

Instead, it’s there to scrape together a veneer of potency; to proclaim its independence by denouncing its largest partner in the government of national unity; to cosplay, for as little money as possible, as a unifying liberation movement rather than a splintering cabal of ultra-rich absentee landlords.

And if someone gets gatvol and throws you out of their house, well, it cost you nothing except the dignity you pawned years ago, and you can always change the subject to Helen Zille.

Happy 113th birthday, ANC. And will the last person to leave please blow out the candles.

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