Nomvula Mokonyane is furious that South African right-wingers are spreading misinformation about the country in the United States, and is clearly determined to keep fighting for truth and the rule of law until someone drops off some whiskey and frozen chickens and tells her to stop.
Over the weekend, the woman whose tenure as minister of water and sanitation is flowing pungently across countless Johannesburg streets told the press that the ANC would continue standing up for “justice, humanity, equality and respect for the rule of law” — no, really, Our Lady of Bosasa Braai-Packs actually said “respect for the rule of law” — because “the ANC’s international relations are not transactional; they are transformational”.
I don’t want to knock writers who’ve fallen on hard times and been forced to become political speechwriters — that fate stalks all of us wordy types — so I won’t blame them for downing the 10 litres of knock-off Fanta Grape in the office fridge, getting high as kites, and telling each other that “transformational, not transactional” was a banger of a line.
Unfortunately, though, it was nonsense. The ANC’s internal policies are both transactional and transformational, using transactions to transform talentless, unemployable poor people into talentless, unfireable rich people, but when it comes to international relations, there is only one country in the world whose course has been radically influenced by the ANC’s “transformational” foreign policy: wretched Zimbabwe, which the ANC helped transform from a country on the cusp of multiparty democracy in 2008 to one doomed to decades of deeply corrupt autocracy.
Of course, Maharaj has been a harsh critic of the ANC government for some years now, ever since he underwent a ground-breaking 12-hour operation to surgically separate himself from the consequences of the things he said and did.
In many ways, the confidence of the gibberish and the sudden prominence of Mokonyane in the news cycle felt like a return to the headiest days of unchallenged, unabashed ANC vainglory, a feeling that was amplified over the weekend as another hangover from those days resurfaced in the form of Mac Maharaj.
I must confess that I thought Maharaj had died some time ago, but that might just have been his credibility. Certainly on the weekend he seemed alive, at least physically, as he told an audience that the South African government was struggling to evolve because “there is a blockage in the system when discussing the mistakes we have committed so that we can learn from them”.
Of course, Maharaj has been a harsh critic of the ANC government for some years now, ever since he underwent a ground-breaking 12-hour operation to surgically separate himself from the consequences of the things he said and did.
Still, for Maharaj to worry so piously about the government not learning from its mistakes, when he spent so many years attacking journalists and gaslighting everyone else, all to make sure that the ANC government never had to acknowledge a mistake, let alone learn from one, well, that’s the sort of cartoonish hypocrisy reserved for the small-time gangster who sells the school bus to a chop shop and then complains that schoolchildren are so tardy these days.
The uncomfortable fact about hypocrisy, however, is that the hypocrites are, by definition, telling a truth, albeit one they refuse to live by. Maharaj is right: the ANC hasn’t learnt from its mistakes. And because it hasn’t learnt from them, in part because Maharaj and people like him deliberately removed not just its ability to learn from mistakes but from anything at all, we find ourselves still trapped in ANC Groundhog Day.
The scandals might involve new names and faces, like Thembi Simelane racking up her second major corruption allegation in six months, or the ANC Youth League allegedly dropping R870,000 at a Sandton hotel and then doing a runner without paying, but these are all fundamentally the same event, over and over again.
And this is why the ANC’s current performance of outrage over the Trump administration is so hollow and, it has to be said, self-defeating.
It is true that the MAGA regime in Washington is amplifying cynical lies about this country, almost certainly to use a bedtime story to frighten its base towards great extremism.
It is true that, as scruple-free mercantilism takes hold of geopolitics, and nuclear-armed oligarchies like those in Russia and now the US speak of the borders of Ukraine and Canada as artificial lines that should be erased, that countries like South Africa should speak up in defence of the concept of national sovereignty and the benefits of constitutional democracy.
What the ANC still hasn’t apparently understood, however, is that none of that can be done by the likes of Mokonyane, and perhaps not even by the people who tolerate her continued presence in high office.
Even now, despite its polling numbers screaming at it like an air-raid siren, it doesn’t seem capable of seeing itself as we and the rest of the world see it; of recognising the laughable hollowness of its rhetoric as it talks freedom and dignity and the rule of law out of mouths that have done nothing but eat and sneer and yawn as millions of South Africans have sunk deeper into despair.
Still, credit where it’s due. This week, as the possibility of sanctions against some ANC members was once again mooted, the party told Business Day that “our leaders are not accountable to Washington”, and this is entirely true. The ANC’s leaders are not accountable to Washington, because, thanks to the tireless work of Mokonyane, Maharaj and thousands of others, they’re accountable to nobody.
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