On Tuesday, July 26, a twister touched down in the township of Tembisa. The meteorological phenomenon only spent a few brief moments on the ground, but it was enough to damage the Pumulani Plaza complex, destroy a number of homes, and injure 20 wind-battered, nonplussed Tembisans.

Those people may have wondered why they were being subjected to this absurdly random sky-born punishment. After all, just 15km down the drag stand the sturdy residences of Sandton, where the twister would have flung nothing more than hypoallergenic lapdogs, ironic garden gnomes, and gold-plated braai tongs into the eye of the storm.

In this country, the Tembisans might have thought, even the weather refuses to screw with the rich.

Over the course of the past three-and-a-half gruelling, seemingly interminable months, South Africa’s politicians, twister-like, have touched down in every last community, shredding the universal moral laws that are supposed to maintain comity among the members of our species. As if sent from some unthinking, unthinkably cruel deity, the South African populace has been knocked into a hypoxic fog: blood on the brain; mist in the eyes; protein in the urine. Collectively, we are huddled beneath an upended bar fridge, praying for Hell to pass.

Just by way of for instance, how is it possible to process a mostly empty stadium in the maligned dump of Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, in which the country’s anointed-by-Jesus ruling party hands out an election manifesto that asks voters to back them because of their stellar record of delivery? Twenty-two years, and even within the ANC’s intellectual, spiritual and literal homeland, there are unbridgeable gaps between a blessed minority, and the palookas on whose backs their faux Ionic colonnades rest.

Then came the Democratic Alliance, with its own rally held in Johannesburg’s southernmost exurbs. They handed out a very similar brochure, which asked voters to back them because, you know, Cape Town. They have owned that sprawling municipality for 10 years, and claim that 67% of their budget goes to poor communities – ha ha of course it does. Cape Town remains an organic garden for hyper-rich settlers, with the natives kept firmly behind the mountain unless required for the purposes of manual labour.

Then came the Economic Freedom Fighters, who had no record to run on, and thus resorted to the second great national electioneering tactic: we’ll give you absolutely freaking everything. There is a third: professing fidelity to Nelson Mandela’s “vision”, a shape-shifting ideology-free outlook that makes less sense the more it’s spun. And last, there’s good, old-fashioned chauvinism, practised in the main by President Jacob Zuma, who speaks so often of his culture that you could be forgiven for thinking that he wants his people to be nothing more than bearers of his Louis Vuitton luggage set.

Famously, Jacob Zuma believes in nothing but his own appetite, which brings us to another of those gaps in South African democracy: at no point in this election cycle, other than during the Daily Maverick’s annual Gathering event in June, did the leaders of the parties face off against each other in person. They were left to travel the country, largely untroubled by the facts, or by having to justify their positions to each other’s constituencies. Zuma no longer speaks to the press, and he restricts his interactions to stage-managed election events. Like some horror movie mutant, he is shoved into luxury vehicles and schlepped from shack to shack, nodding away at the stage-managed words of ANC T-shirt-wearing grandmas over lukewarm cups of Five Roses.

Democracy has famously been described as the worst system of governance, except for all the others. Retail politics, as practised in South Africa and elsewhere, is all the others, minus the Nazis and the Stalinists. Nothing works, no one cares, and nothing resembling a policy discussion enters the national discourse. (Although the EFF ran on an unambiguously pro-poor, socialist programme, when they were asked how it would actually work, they showered us with glibness.)

Our political parties are football teams, deriving their identity from the colour of their shirts, a problem that has much to do with what remains of the South African media. We’re way too focused on breaking events or overwrought analysis (example: this piece), and shy away from anything that would bring our politicians to heel on matters of policy. But more blame must be attributed to the parties themselves, who genuinely believe that South Africans are too retarded to engage in anything other than a half-assed discussion regarding Madiba’s Gilded Legacy, or the scourge of corruption.

On that last item, the ANC, by the by, wasn’t born corrupt. They’re corrupt because the system they adhere to – neolib business-first trickle-down social democracy, underwritten by an elite that offshores every last rand of their gains – is inherently corrupting. This crap can sort of work in Germany, with its highly skilled population, and a financial/political cabal backed by a powerhouse currency that they control. But it can’t work in a country with a (deliberately) uneducated populace, who can only access trickle-down anything by means of a government handout. The DA, having made the incredible move of endorsing the ANC’s National Development Plan, functions as a weird carbon copy of the ruling party. Racist their leadership may be, but what real-world difference does it make when the ANC governs along the ruts dug out by pith-helmeted colonialists?

It was once not too much of a stretch to believe that South Africa would become a laboratory for new forms of local, community-led governance, a belief that was enhanced by digital devices that are far more suited to micro-organisation than they are to fomenting revolution. (Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to a church door roughly 500 years before the first iPhone; we don’t need apps to get angry.) In her hands, the average South African holds more raw processing power than Athenian democrats could ever have imagined possible. The lone pleasure of my job has been those moments when I’ve observed self-governing communities offering up their spare time to run focused, politically minded local organisations. Inevitably, they’re choked out by sustained campaigns of police brutality, or by the government’s legal might, or by the whims of our campaign laws.

It is they who should dictate to government, not the other way round. In a representational political system, politicians are meant to be vicars – not of God, but of the people. According to their own assertions, Jacob Zuma and his henchmen are Jesus’ representatives, here to rule until the troubled Jewish prophet returns to do so Himself. Don’t kid yourself, Mzansi: voting isn’t enough to maintain a democracy. The South African people have nothing to do with South Africa’s future, because they have no control over their representatives. In this, betting on the ANC because they are the most likely to keep the social granting system is the wisest move a citizen can make. At a local level – and these elections should ostensibly have been focused on local issues – better the devil you know than the crooked fool you don’t.

So what’s coming down the pipe? South Africa’s inevitable move into the coalition era will bring change, but not for the better. Horse-trading will become the principal interest of local governments, and whatever coherence a party’s political beliefs adhered to will be sacrificed in order to cobble together a higgledy piggledy shitstorm that serves Power, and Power alone. Balkanisation, rule by unruliness, a total mess. Not to sound like Donald Trump’s speechwriter, but the whole planet is going down the tubes, largely because the ruinous system under which The Donald got rich enough to buy America is unravelling. The best way to maintain the status quo is to keep people fearful and enraged, rather than strong and empowered.

This is a fearful and enraged country.

Tell that to the families of the 20 people who have been killed in the pandemic of political violence, and they’ll probably know of what you speak. Tell it to the journalists canned by the state broadcaster for not uncreating non-reality. Tell it to the 35% of the country that can’t get a job.

Twisters, twisters, everywhere. Unsurprisingly, in Tembisa the windstorm became a political moment: the parties handed out blankets and bromides, transforming the storm’s damage into just another stop on the campaign trail.

These rulers, these loudhailers of God – if they can’t make the weather, they’ll do the next best thing, and spin it. DM

Photo: Leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, President Jacob Zuma (C) arrives to address the party’s final pre-election rally in Johannesburg, South Africa, 31 July 2016. EPA/CORNELL TUKIRI