Life’s a game but it’s not fair
I break the rules so I don’t care (What’s up)
So I keep doin’ my own thing
Walkin’ tall against the rain
Victory’s within the mile (What’s up)
Almost there, don’t give up now
Only thing that’s on my mind
Is who gon’ run this town tonight (What’s up)
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, heyy
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey (What’s up)
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, heyy,
Is who’s gon’ run this town tonight?

“Run This Town” – Jay-Z feat. Kanye West & Rihanna

“Who runs this country?” asked a journalist of another journalist moments before the latest ANC explanatory festival kicked off at Luthuli House. It was a great question, an essential question – it could be, should be the title of a book written by a grouchy local hack who was semi-educated at Oxford, a tome that rips up the bestseller list and lights up talk radio with controversial theorems and inventive scuttlebutt.

Because, like, who does run the country?

The answer is not Jacob Zuma, who runs a small faction of thriving gangsters within the ruling party. The answer is not the ruling party, which is comprised of a small faction of thriving gangsters and a bunch of wannabe technocrats, all of whom are currently popping rivets like a submarine sounding below the recommended depth. The answer is not Johann Rupert and his white monopoly capital pals, and nor is it Cyril Ramaphosa, Paul Mashatile and their black oligarch pals – they’re just taking advantage of the weird admixture of stability and chaos that defines “developing” economies in the Age of Insanity. And the answer is not regime changers in England, who are reasonably busy with their own situation right now.

Before I could overhear my colleagues resolve this question, in waddled the Secretary-General of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe. (An aside: Uncle Gweezy most certainly doesn’t run the country.) He was particularly solicitous on this fine Johannesburg morning, even shaking hands with a reporter for this site – although he gingerly rolled the title of news publications around his tongue as if they were flecked with rat shit. Nonetheless, he shook more hands and thanked us all for coming. He needed friends, because Gweezy, he’s lost a few in the media recently.

Anyway, this was a National Working Committee (NWC) media briefing, a means of bringing us up to date on what the people who think they run this country are thinking about thinking. On Monday, said Gweezy, the NWC deliberated on four issues of great importance to South Africans: the upcoming municipal elections; the SABC and its recalcitrant leaders; ANC stalwart Marius Fransman’s recent sexual misadventures, and occurrences in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), especially as they pertained to Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

First, some good news: the ANC has won the elections! “We are now in the final countdown,” said Uncle Gweezy, and victory was not only certain, but had somehow already been attained. Indeed, this was Luthuli House, where the theory of relativity, the space/time continuum, physics, metaphysics and a handful of strawberries are shoved into a celestial smoothie blender, and whipped into a frothy, easily digestible concoction.

Even though victory had been attained, he somehow wanted people to go back in time (forward in space?) to vote, so that winning this election (The next election? The previous election?), although already won, could successfully be actualised. Sure, Mantashe and the NWC had noted some of the surveys, which implied that the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and Tshwane were likely to be lost. But that would not de-motivate them.

“Our work in those areas will tamper with the surveys,” he told us.

Speaking of tampering, we soon moved on to a discussion regarding the South African Broadcasting Corporation, currently headed up by the naughtiest fellow in the nation: Hlaudi “Get Fucked” Motsoeneng. Hlaudi recently declared that the SABC will no longer broadcast images of the destruction of state property, and only happy and positive stories regarding our state president will make the cut. He’s canned real journalists and generally been a total dick.

But although the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) on Monday ruled that you can’t censor the news with such obvious glee (believe me, all of us censor the news. We just do it with a little more class), Hlaudi wasn’t interested. He ran this town, and it was his rules.

The NWC was unimpressed with his attitude. Last week, the ANC National Executive Committee assured South Africans that they had no clue why Hlaudi felt like he could act with such impunity. (Hint: he belongs to Zuma.) Once again, they demanded that he heel to their superior power. “We thought it was necessary to remind everybody that the constitution of the ANC would encourage a free society based on the free flow of information,” said Mantashe.

This was about “arming” citizens with information. “An ignorant society cannot be democratic,” he reminded us. The ANC’s media charter wants us to know everything, always, so we can make informed decisions based on the relevant data on hand. In this, Gweezy welcomed the ruling by Icasa. Defiance, he said, destroys institutions and individuals. Soon, they’d realise that defiance wouldn’t make them a “better public broadcaster”.

Defy a Chapter 9 institution? “You learn the hard way,” he said. Ha ha.

Quick question: If the ruling party doesn’t want censorship – and what ruling party anywhere in the world doesn’t – who does?

It’s a goshdarned mystery of genuinely mysterious proportions.

Mantashe mumbled a few words about the Fransman imbroglio, (matter is going to the ANC national disciplinary committee) and then “expressed concern” about the popular uprisings and general instability unfolding in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Thing is, these weren’t popular uprisings. They were – all together now! – regime change initiatives. It wasn’t about the crap economy – the economies had always been crap. And they will be crap for a long time, promised Gweezy. But that shouldn’t give regime changers a licence to regime change. It was the obligation of everyone in Zimbabwe to help with the economy, even if they were having their brains beaten out with a baton.

“These activities follow the assessment we had earlier made as liberation movements of the sponsored elements seeking to effect regime change in the region,” he said.

Which nefarious entity wanted to run a country that came with ginormous debt, destroyed infrastructure and Grace Mugabe? Gweezy did not say.

Another mystery.

They’re piling up, the mysteries, the conundrums, the puzzles, the WTFs. Soon, we will revert to a state of being pre-Genesis, when the sky and the sea are one, and we are all just blobs of consciousness floating around in the nothingness of Nothing.

Who runs the universe? No idea. Who runs the planet? Dunno. Who runs this country? Nope, sorry. Who runs this town? Shrug.

Chaos, y’all. The best thing to do is to chug the Luthuli House smoothie and to move on. It’s easier to believe what they believe, to exist in their reality, where censorship doesn’t require leaving burn-y things off the telly, but rather warping the entire physical sense of space/time, quanta by eensy-weensy quanta. DM

Photo of ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe by Greg Nicolson.