Defend Truth

Opinionista

The blue pill? The red pill? Or, no pill at all?

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Marianne Thamm has toiled as a journalist / writer / satirist / editor / columnist / author for over 30 years. She has published widely both locally and internationally. It was journalism that chose her and not the other way around. Marianne would have preferred plumbing or upholstering.

Forced removals in Hammanskraal, schools ablaze in Limpopo, violent student protests, an economy slouching towards the long drop, talk of treachery and treason, rolls of razor wire around Parliament, a president so rudderless and out of touch he resorts to prayer for guidance. Sometimes it feels like someone hit the rewind button and we’re back in 1980s South Africa. Point is, we aren’t and that’s a good thing. But how the hell did we get here?

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Morpheus, to Neo in The Matrix.
Granted, I had picked up a nasty flu bug somewhere and the TV screen wasn’t 3D, but I swear if I scrunched up my eyes a bit while watching NPA head Shaun Abrahams delivering his presser from Pretoria on Monday he was a dead ringer for Chester Missing.
I kept thinking I would catch a glimpse of Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, Nomgcobo Jiba’s hand up his puppet hole as she sat quite still and nonchalantly on the white couch behind Abrahams while he told us that he and he alone was making the decision, yes, me myself I, no, no one else, only me (okay okay we get it) to appeal the SCA ruling to reinstitute various charges of corruption against President Jacob Zuma. But nowadays they tell me you can do this sort of ventriloquist stuff by remote, so it looks like the puppet is really alive and you can’t see the strings.
The other unsettling thing, and maybe it was the meds, is that a lot of the time Abrahams sounded a bit like one of those unsettling electronic GPS voices or an ex-smoker wearing a fake voice box.
What, fellow citizens, to make of it all?
Well, first, the political honeymoon is over and none of us got to steal a fluffy bathrobe (well maybe one or two of us got away with one). Frankly it is a relief. The ridiculous costumes and masks, the play-play rainbow nation rituals, the nauseating “multiracial” beer ads have all been exposed for what they really were. Fakes. Fakes like in a Potemkin Village, masking massive challenges and with some glimpses of a new dawn way off on the horizon.
We know now that the script is being written as the show unravels before us and that, for now, Jacob Zuma is the lead actor, the director, the producer and the author. But rest assured, somewhere in the wings, a new script with new actors is being pounded out just as fast. We just have no idea when this movie can be expected to make a turn on the public circuit.
Amin Cajee, author of Fordsburg Fighter – The journey of an MK Volunteer eyed me with an air of benign resignation when I once asked him why no one told us the ANC could get this bad.
You wouldn’t have believed us,” he said, smiling.
No, we wouldn’t have. There were books written but we ignored them. We’ve had way too much Kool-Aid. We had our beloved and pragmatic Mandela, no real understanding of the ANC. We loved its colours, a lot. We thought it occupied a moral high ground. We were naïve, battered, bruised. There is no such thing anywhere in the world – a moral high ground – but this we know now.
When a government is serving interests other than those of its people it creates all manner of narratives to justify its behaviour, to mask its motives and to cuckold the masses. Soon people begin to suspect they are losing their minds or they set their compasses by what their government tells them.
That is how the apartheid state beguiled white South Africans into believing that fellow black South Africans were actually dangerous, godless, communist automatons who had been possessed by agents from Cuba and the USSR and who had secreted microchips in their heads so that they could wipe out God-fearing, white Christian Nationalists from the face of the earth.
According to them, people were not rising up because they were oppressed, dispossessed, forcibly removed, murdered, detained, incarcerated, starved, beaten, humiliated, made invisible. No, they were rising up because a Russian voice in their heads told them to do so.
It’s called propaganda and it worked so very well. While white citizens either looked the other way, benefitted from the government’s world view or actively participated in maintaining it, politicians raided the Treasury, rigged tenders and made themselves, their families and their friends very, very, very rich. There were many who were drawn to this gilded and beguiling orbit and there were many who propped it up as long as it worked for them. And there were some who watched this from afar and desired it.
The chaos of apartheid was great for the accumulation of this ill-gotten wealth while you could blame everyone else for the impending apocalypse and everything that didn’t work. Criminals thrived and it was only the economic, cultural and political boycotts that prevented our local operators from going global. But we did let in Vito Palazzolo, the Mafia’s No 2, who lived in South Africa for years bottling water and hanging out with politicians and other movers and shakers and being photographed regularly for social pages.
Today we rank up there with the best as around 150 criminal syndicates operate in South Africa dealing in a smörgåsbord of illicit goods from Rhino horn to perlemoen to methamphetamine and human beings. Maybe the Hawks are chasing Pravin Gordhan because they can relax a bit now that Radovan Krejcir is behind bars for a long, long time (maybe).
We had the Mandela and some of the Mbeki years where good things happened and bad things happened but we were free and we felt we were heading somewhere. We came up with a plan, we had our eyes fixed on the horizon, albeit a distant one.
Meanwhile, there were those who who had their eye fixed on the Treasury and SARS and all the goodies in the pantry. And these are the guys in control at the moment and they are going to create a narrative that they want us all to believe so that they can cat-burglar their way into the national honeypot.
They’ve got their people in strategic positions, you know, where it matters most, for now. This helps to obfuscate and delay matters while they prod around looking for other weak points in the system that is barely holding.
These are the guys who would have you believe that we are in shit street because of white monopoly capital (well we can talk about that) and because the West – i.e. Imperialist, Capitalists and their agents, the CIA and the FBI and MI5 are dead keen on totally discrediting the little miracle that happened on the southern tip of Africa. It is someone else’s fault the economy has tanked that the rand has lost value and that ratings agencies are viewing us with a jaundiced eye. It is someone else’s fault that millions are unemployed, landless, starving and, above all, hopeless.
Some say that R35-billion has been wasted and lost to arrogance, greed, corruption and nepotism in the past five years. The figures are too eye-wateringly large. No wonder President Zuma has trouble deciphering them.
That this might have something to do with the smouldering and simmering resentment that hangs like a threatening pall over contemporary South Africa is a matter those who currently lead the ANC appear not to notice.
When people clutch my arm with boney, tense fingers and ask how this will end, I reply that I do not know. What I do know is that there are people who care about this country enough and deeply and who are working hard to stop the looting, the lying and the cheating.
The courts are there, the Constitution watches over us, civil society will not shut up, a free press speaks truth to power, students challenge authority and demand decolonisation, our opposition parties have rejuvenated the landscape. Think of them what you must but between the DA’s court actions and the EFF’s energising belligerence, the ANC of Jacob Zuma has nowhere to hide and soon we will see it for what it has become – an empty, hollow shell.
The thing is, you can take the blue pill (and this is no endorsement of the DA) and let the story end right here, right now, or you can take the red pill (and this is no endorsement of the EFF) and stay in Wonderland. The ANC leadership right now, with President Jacob Zuma as its leader, has overdosed on the red jobbies. They’ll soon wake up with a bad hangover.
Meanwhile we have seen through it all. We watch the president apologise on April Fool’s Day and know he doesn’t mean it. In fact you need to watch how South Africans reacted in this marvellous episode of Gogglebox SA to understand that the scales have dropped from our eyes. We know we are being played. We can see through Advocate Abraham’s charade. And that is all that matters. Knowing you are being played is the beginning of wisdom. It is the beginning of taking control of our lives. DM
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