Let’s consider for a moment the solicitations made by President Jacob Zuma during last weekend’s ANC 103^rd birthday celebrations.

Hold that thought: let’s consider for a moment the fact that the ANC is 103. One of the great, if not the greatest, of all liberation parties is comfortably into its second century, a legacy that remains largely unparalleled anywhere in the world. One-hundred-and-three. That makes it nine years older than the current iteration of the UK’s ruling Conservative Party, half a century older than Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF, and roughly 102 years older than South Africa’s upstart EFF. The ANC could easily field its own liberation All-Star squad: Pixley kaSeme, John Dube, Albert Luthuli, O.R. Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Nelson Mandela—and those are just the fullbacks.

No other party anywhere in the democratic universe could (fairly) win an election with over 62 percent of the vote, and still be considered losers. The landslide doesn’t have any real meaning for the ANC, because the alliance is meant to include all South Africans in a broad church—a vast gothic cathedral upon which every last political whim has been visited. Apartheid’s old generals and the commies that tried to bring them down, all huddled into the apse, praying to different gods at the same time. The ANC was, in its final conception, one of the most awesome democratic projects of all time. Along with its primary alliance partners, it freed 35 million people from the indignities of Apartheid. It is an obelisk on the plains of history.

The ANC is.

And yet, the ANC isn’t. In 2015, the party stands for nothing except itself. It has dispensed with the last traces of ideology, shed everything except its rhetoric, and is faithful only to the clergy, all of whom have become very, very rich. Or—if we are to believe President Jacob Zuma—not quite rich enough. In Cape Town, the centre of the opposition’s lair, Zuma got on his knees and mewled. Democracy, he told us last weekend, is expensive. And if we hope to keep the ANC democratic, if we hope to keep it to its promise of creating a South Africa in which we all have a say, then we’re going to have to pay up. To wit:

“You know democracy … it’s very expensive, time-consuming, very costly. And if the ANC has to maintain that route [of] democracy, it must be strong… It must be strong financially, not so? So I always appeal that … just one cheque. Just sign and give it to the treasurer-general. Give us figures but not more than six … Please support your organisation for the future of this country [and] to be successful.”

There’s a lot to absorb in those seventy-or-so words, much to parse. I particularly like “time-consuming”—what a drag, all the campaigning and voting and manifesto-making and speechifying. Having followed President Zuma on the campaign trail, I can assure you that he wasn’t always enjoying himself. He has looked less a man of the people over the past few years, and more a man of the person—that person being himself. And the ANC as an institution seems to be losing interest in all that time-consuming democracy nonsense. It functions best when praising itself, when creating the sort of spectacle that took place in the Greenpoint Stadium last weekend.

“The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue,” wrote the French Situationalist Guy Debord. The ANC has fashioned for itself a feedback loop, in which it only hears its own praise singers, and in which its praise singers effectively set policy. And money is praise made manifest. As Zuma put it two years ago, at the ANC’s 101^st bash: “[Y]ou can support and be a supporter, but if you go beyond that and become a member… your business will multiply. Everything you touch will multiply. I’ve always said that a wise business person will support the ANC… because supporting the ANC means you’re investing very well in your business.”

To invest in the ANC is to invest in your future: democracy’s magic resides in a credit card. In this, the ANC keeps good company. In the United States, the sort of corruption that would make South Africans hurl up their Jungle Oats is now legally baked into the system: due to the 2010 Citizens United defeat of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002, so-called “independent-expenditure-only committees, or superPACs, can blow hundreds of millions of dollars in support of a candidate, so long as they are not officially affiliated with that candidate. Money is now the point of politics. It’s the only thing that counts.

Much like Zuma, US President Barack Obama, whom American taxpayers expect to run the country, spends a huge chunk of his time hooking for cash. He doesn’t lead, so much as beg. And while numerous democracies have strict limits on how much political parties can accept in private funding, both the ANC and the DA have made sure that that is not the case in South Africa. Both parties have repeatedly blocked any party funding reform, and so we have no idea who gives what to whom, and how much. In other words, those who underwrite the major political parties get to do so in secret. And when it’s time to ask for a favour in return, they expect it delivered under the cover of dark.

Yes, democracy is expensive. It’s even more expensive when a party finds it necessary to celebrate its own existence once a year. The ANC’s annual birthday bash is a lavish affair, attended by the richest people in the country, who pay between R150,000 and R3 million a head, depending on how close their dinner plate is to Zuma’s. They pay for proximity to power. At the presidential table sat one of the country’s richest men, Patrice Motsepe. He may not be a bad guy, Motsepe, but he got rich in the old-fashioned way. The ANC birthday bash was his party, after all—he paid for a good chunk of it. But it would be nice to know what else he bought, along with the salmon. Back in1825, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the trouble, and wrote about those who “look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry.”

In other words, democracy has always been under threat from money. The Motsepes of the world represent the new aristocracy, sitting at power’s feet, paying for the Louis Vuitton loafers. They, and the corporations and financial institutions they represent, are the only citizens that count. It’s not that the law doesn’t apply to them, it’s that the law is designed for them.

“To maintain that route of democracy,” as President Zuma put it, is to put up a whole bunch of e-toll gantries along the way. The ANC needs so much money because it spends so much money—because the ANC believes that the money will always come. Money is not just the primary perquisite of power, it’s the point of power. Money is not just the primary perquisite of power, it’s the point of power. The world’s greatest liberation party is selling itself like a hustler on a street corner because under Jacob Zuma, the networks of patronage have become so entrenched that they’re propping up the country. Those who buy into the networks, according to the president, are promised the Promised Land. Their businesses will succeed because they have purchased success. The law will be made for them, around them. Their businesses will multiply. Their cars will multiply. The ANC offers nothing but endless multiplication to those with an existing chequebook.

Democracy, it seems, will be undone by figures. But please, friends—not more than six. DM