In this year of apocalyptic signs and wonders, of dark divinations and end-game Twitter feeds, one posse stands above it all. Zuma and his crowded field of kleptocrats, securocrats, larcenists, spinmeisters, Russian wet squads and scantily-clad twerkers have banded together to become the 2016 Dr Strangelove of the Year.

So much has happened in the past 12 months that nothing has happened. It began, you’ll recall, under a maelstrom of political instability, with a beleaguered finance minister the only thing keeping South Africa from a meltdown. It ends in much the same way. After a vicious local election campaign, the ANC no longer governs the country’s big metros, but they never really governed the country’s big metros, if you get my meaning. As for the president, he and his faction have “overplayed their hand” and are thus “on the ropes”, the same clichés that were uselessly applied to them last December. The Guptas left but didn’t leave. Fees must fall, but won’t. Facebook continues to be the national repository for, ahem, polite racial discourse and the posting of cute reconciliation videos.

Abroad, sure, the executive producer of Celebrity Apprentice and his crew of billionaires now command the world’s largest supply of intercontinental ballistic missiles – but down here at the bottom of Africa, it doesn’t matter who runs America, because we don’t matter to America. Syria continues to be barrel-bombed to rubble; Europe continues to tiptoe backwards into the Dark Ages; emerging markets continue not to emerge. Meanwhile, Russian-financed troll armies have hacked political correctness and mainstreamed “alt-right” Klansmen-speak – but there is no such thing as “mainstream” any more, so the above statement is effectively meaningless.

In other words, different, but much the same.

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Observed from outer space, 2016 hammered Jacob Zuma with unrelenting viciousness. Down here on earth, he withstood the barrage and continues to rule this land and everyone/thing in it. Over the weekend, he declared himself a “political genius”— the least incorrect statement to leave his lips in roughly a decade. Let’s randomly consider the events of last February, for no other reason than that they perfectly represent the man’s ironclad immortality. No sooner had the year begun, and verily the Economic Freedom Fighters kicked out of the country the Gupta Family, who currently serve as the president’s paymaster generals. Barely a week later, Zuma was forced to giggle his way through a series of disruptions at the annual State of the Nation cage match. Meanwhile, a hearing regarding the Nkandla matter was on the block in the Constitutional Court. Zuma’s advisors blinked, and his counsel insisted that the Con Court should appoint the auditor general and minister of finance to assess how much he should chip in for the extravagant upgrades to his homestead. Later, government lawyers mangled their arguments to such an extent that it was difficult to know if they’d ever so much as passed a bar—and not stopped to consume all the drinks inside it.

All of which set up what should have been the Great Denouement: ‘Twas 31 March, within a packed Constitutional Court, and one of the most consequential moments in post-apartheid history was unfolding – Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogeong and full bench ruled that the president and the National Assembly acted in contempt of the Constitution with regard to the Nkandla debacle.

Instantly, Zuma’s rule was rendered illegitimate. But by definition, political geniuses don’t put much stock in legitimacy. With all that bad stuff out of the way, Zuma was now free to work on his day job.

Which, it should be noted, is concerned in the main with robbing this country into penury.

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Twenty-two years is nowhere near long enough to stress-test any political system; it’s barely an eye-blink when it comes to a democracy. It is thus worth quickly parsing the species of government under which South Africa writhes its way into non-existence. If scientists are now insisting that all perception is largely bullshit, considering that we can’t process the quantum gaps in what we describe as “reality”, this goes double for political analysis. So, in an attempt to peer vaguely at the itsy-bitsy quanta, we learn that we are subject to the rigours of a majoritarian system, not of a democracy. It works like this: a small cohort of ANC cadres “vote” through their branches for a leader, who becomes president of the party and, 18 months later, president of the country. That’s the happy part of the equation. Once in Parliament, the ANC have already caucused the stuffing out of any tabled legislation that makes it to the floor of the Big House, meaning that the strongest voice in the ANC owns the country, with all input from dissenting voices in the press, the opposition, or civil society, ignored completely.

This has resulted in two inevitable outcomes. First, an unbroken line has been maintained from colonialism/apartheid into the democratic era: this country is run solely for the benefit of its elites. Second, majoritarianism has fundamentally undermined the democratic aspects of an already fake democracy: a president rules due to the strength of his faction.

Viewed this way, the astonishing dance that Jacob Zuma has performed around the (embarrassingly anaemic) stopgaps on his executive power don’t seem to be so astonishing at all.

Cockblocking any threats to this status quo stand an ungodly crew of henchfolk, all of whom owe their careers and their wealth to both his benefaction and the benefaction of his benefactors. Zuma has taken tabs, and recently reminded his enemies that he knows what they?e stolen, and how much. Besides, the loathed Guptas, as corrosive as they may be, are little more than a symptom of a much larger malaise. The disease, of course, is the non-existent border between government and business – something that will not disappear should the current president fall. This country is rigged to support what most South Africans call corruption, but what Zuma and his loudhailers routinely pretend is transformation or empowerment.

An ex-intelligence hack himself, Zuma has leaned on the security cluster to infiltrate almost every aspect of the state apparatus. Minister of State Security David Mahlobo, along with Police Minister Nkosinathi Nhleko and Communications Minister Faith Muthambi, have teamed up with Major-General Mthandazo Berning Ntlemeza of the Hawks and Advocate Shaun Abrahams of the National Prosecuting Authority – a Suicide Squad assembled to bring every aspect of the state into Zuma’s ambit. (And while they may not always get along with each other, they always bow before the Boss.) Abrahams in particular has repeatedly humiliated himself in order to bring Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan down on a variety of spurious charges – regardless of the consequences, the Treasury must be tamed.

Within important state owned enterprises, Zuma zombies drool their way through executive offices and boardrooms. Occasionally, following an event like the release of former Public Protector Thuli Madonsela’s “State of Capture” report—another of 2016’s ostensibly notable events—one of their number takes a tumble: former Eskom CE Brian Molefe is now unemployed and all but unemployable, which means he’ll shortly be in line for a crucial deployment. But Dudu Myeni still runs the national airline, and Hlaudi Motsoeneng—despite the fact that a High Court just ruled that his appointment was unlawful—still has a terrifying amount of power at the national broadcaster. Their job is to bleed state-owned institutions of cash, and pump it into tenders awarded to Zuma-linked shell companies. And as we were once again reminded this week, the State Security Agency’s job is to ensure that they do their job without any undue interference.

And so, the loop closes, and the quanta get squished into focus: South Africa is little more than Team Zuma’s corporate cleanout scheme, and it works with supreme elegance.

Ja, but don’t blame the bad guys too much: they’ve merely perfected a system that was designed to be exploited. For all the praise lavished on this country’s progressive Constitution, the court that backs it up with vigour, and a judiciary that by and large does an admirable job of maintaining its independence, nothing has changed since this time last year.

Well, not nothing nothing. Members of the ANC itself have been riled into something approaching action. Parliamentary ad hoc committees have as recently as Monday squeezed institutions like the SABC into disgorging gobs of internal filth, and surprise! – it’s all so much worse than we imagined. At the most recent ANC National Executive Committee, a good percentage of members finally found the nuts to push for a no confidence vote against the Godfather.

He sidestepped their parry, and now they await the axe of retribution. The payback, one imagines, is going to smart a little.

* * *

Zuma and his faction will end this year almost entirely intact, and that’s thanks in no small part to the people of South Africa. Nothing resembling a united movement to unseat him has appeared on the streets of this country. Yes, his party slipped in the polls following the local election campaign, but Zuma is still correct when he says that any political party in any democracy would literally kill for the ANC’s numbers.

Civil society initiatives like #ZumaMustFall, or the heavily branded idiocy of LeadSA – run by the same cats who somehow missed the whole Marikana thing – have failed to excite the public imagination. The reasons for this should be obvious: Divide et impera dies hard. South Africa, as has so often been mentioned in these pages, is not a country, but a GPS way point on the way to Antarctica. We’re far too busy hating each other to collectively devise an exit strategy for a thief-president, and Number One knows this all too well – he dog whistles separate tunes to a thousand cohorts, while himself playing the Eternal Victim.

Just this week, it was established that Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea, would face impeachment after hundreds of thousands took to the streets decrying the corruption that had defined her tenure. That kind of mobilisation requires a country with a joint spirit: when the same white cats driving the same kick-ass Mercedes Benzes they drove during apartheid suddenly picket following the firing of a finance minister, solidarity is not exactly a natural next step. We continue to live in different universes, and nothing about that seems likely to change in the near future.

Ah, it’s a mess. Presiding over it all: Team Zuma. They took some blows, no question. But they truly did own 2016. Despite all the opposition amassed against them – despite the ad hoc parliamentary committees, the internal ANC haters, the legal broadsides, the hashtag campaigns, and the occasional poisoning – the odds are on them to do a repeat in 2017. Who has the power to take them down?

No one, cupcake. Have an especially merry festive season. You’ll need the break. DM

Photo: Thank you to Stanley Kubrick for an endless inspiration.