At this year’s Venice Biennale, the British star-tiste Damien Hirst produced an extensive and shitty conceptual work called Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. It was a compendium of massive-scale sculptural works, presented alongside video footage that portrayed underwater divers “recovering” the treasures from a fictional shipwreck. It was so spectacularly terrible that critics practically took flight with their opprobrium. Hirst’s building-sized sculptures depicting fake gods and goddesses, many of them covered in Disney World barnacles, felt like the end of Art, the final word on the corrosive relationship between capitalism and creativity. Enraged observers couldn’t help pointing out that not only had Hirst ripped off an ancient Nigerian sculpture called “Head of Ife” without offering attribution, but he also appeared to have plagiarised the whole lousy concept from a contemporary Grenadian artist named Jason deCaires Taylor.

Appropriation on top of appropriation; con on top of con – the only thing real about the show was the fact that it was entirely ersatz, a giant scam designed to rob overweight Emirati sheiks and drunken Russian oligarchs of their not-so-hard-earned billions.

Which, naturally, got me thinking about the ANC.

On account of life being one big drama directed by a malevolent Hirst-like comedian, the ANC and its affiliates often stage their conferences or councils in a sprawling faux Greek compound in Pretoria, called the Saint George Hotel. Not unlike Hirst’s latest work, the Saint George is a cheap knock-off of a cheap knock-off, sold to people who haven’t earned any money, but have borrowed rather a lot of it, forever. So it was with the organisers of Cosatu’s 6^th Central Committee, who had gathered representatives of affiliated unions in order to workshop the federation into what remains of the future.

This was day two of the council, and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was scheduled to give the keynote address. (Day One featured a spirited address from SACP president Blade Nzimande.) Famously, President Zuma has been barred from speaking at Cosatu events, and the federation has pretty much backed Ramaphosa as their preferred candidate in the unofficial official succession race – a contest that doesn’t kick off until September, but has nonetheless been under way since February.

The event directly follows more revelations of Gupta involvement in the affairs of the state, to say nothing of last weekend’s unpleasantly toasty National Executive Committee meeting, where Zuma was forced to parry another (pathetic) attempt to dethrone him. Yesterday, during the usual press conference following the NEC meeting, members of the media were treated to the human bag of ayahuasca that is Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe. It was a genuinely perplexing experience, even by Mantashe’s standards. His sentences worked themselves into serpentine twirls around his own neck, choking him into statements like, “Dialectically, far left and far right sometimes come very close to each other,” while pointing at his own buttocks.

The take-home from Mantashe’s circumlocutions was that the ANC is so divided and weak that it cannot self-correct, and nor can it fend off the outright and irrefutable threat of Guptarisation, to say nothing of more formal means of corporate capture.

In other words, everyone is bought.

And yet, there stood Gwede in the Saint George, swaying his hips along to the struggle songs sung by union shop stewards. (“He gets greyer and greyer dealing with the problems in the ANC,” Ramaphosa would later chuckle.) The struggle songs morphed into Zuma Must Go songs, which the president of the federation, S’dumo Dlamini, clearly didn’t enjoy. Like Mantashe, Dlamini is one of this country’s great portrayers of Political Hamlet – seemingly too afraid to issue an outright condemnation of Jacob Zuma, or to skip his birthday festivities, and yet ostensibly running a federation that has come out in support of Zuma’s enemies. What does Zuma have on Dlamini?

The answer probably lurks in a thread of soon-to-be-leaked e-mails.

And Dlamini has every right to be afraid: as the union president spoke, a group of thugs calling themselves the “MK Foundation” were “protesting” outside the house of SACP deputy secretary-general Solly Mapaila, who is one of Zuma’s more outspoken and fearless critics. (This shit is getting extremely real. And while Solly is a tough man, he looked wan when I spoke with him. “Ah, things have been going fine,” is all he would say.)

“Please, comrades,” mewled Dlamini to his Zuma-bashing comrades, “that’s enough.”

Cosatu’s leader then proceeded to offer a précis of Ramaphosa’s history in the labour movement: his days building the National Union of Mineworkers; his contributions to the war against the regime; the efforts that brought organised labour under the umbrella of the alliance; his appointment as Secretary-General of the African National Congress. “You led us in the building and making of the doyenne of this country, the Constitution,” said Dlamini, referring to Ramaphosa’s critical involvement in crafting democracy’s foundational document. “Our Constitution remains a very, very important document that guides us, and that no one should undermine.”

Well. It’s this very constitutionalism that has worked like a chainsaw through the ANC, divvying up the congress into those who still believe in Ramaphosa’s favourite piece of paper, and the reactionaries who want something more, or other, or better, or worse.

And so unfolded a tiny forgettable battle in this war.

“There are some in our own ranks who say that Cosatu has become weakened in light of other federations have been formed,” said the Deputy President, after taking to the stage in front of hundreds of very happy delegates. He insisted that the presence of both Mantashe and SACP leader Blade Nzimande were testament to the continued relevance of the country’s premier labour movement. “When we first formed the federation on 1 December, 1985, we declared that a giant has risen.”

He then went on to describe the “critical link” between the labour movement and the ANC. He spoke about the victories earned for working people in this country. He insisted that Cosatu, maligned and weakened, was nonetheless “a giant on the move”. It was time for a rebirth, a reboot. It was now the occasion to go out into the ANC branches and back real candidates who were able to help move the country forward.

Ramaphosa spoke about the importance of the classic labour movement slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all”. He reminded his audience that the slogan had fallen into disuse. “For as long as workers are not united, inequality will remain the defining feature of our politics.” Out of the millions of people in the country still working, he said, only 30% are organised. No one proselytised any more, he lamented – the fire must be rekindled.

“Call on us to join you in the trenches,” he growled. “I will recruit Comrade Blade, I will recruit Comrade Mantashe, call on us to engage in a major major campaign to organise workers.”

Which is basically a guarantee that nothing will get done.

Ramaphosa then guided us into verbal clouds of vagueness and opacity. “Our challenges are structural and systemic,” he said, “and we need to uproot them.” He spoke about how “all the people” must share the wealth. “Comrades, there is much talk in this country about radical economic transformation. But we should not leave out the ‘socio-’ part of it. We need to be focusing on its impact on society, on the people, on how it’s going to eradicate poverty, on how it’s going to swell the ranks of our working class. Radical economic transformation can’t be a mask to hide the plunder of our resources.”

He paused, and then emphasised every syllable: “You can’t help think that when they say these things, there is a hidden agenda.” These are just words that sound revolutionary, insisted Ramaphosa. “Comrades, we should not dupe our people, and deceive them.” The crowd clapped in appreciation. No radical what-what for this bunch.

Ramaphosa reminded us that the recent downgrades from two of the three ratings agencies were a “big blow”, and we “know what sparked them off” – he clearly wasn’t in elucidation mode. He quoted a turn of phrase employed by Mantashe during Monday’s surreal press conference, saying that there was an amorphous “restlessness” in society, and that the divisions within the alliance are not ideological, but come down to who gets to steal more, better, quicker. “We need to recalibrate the way in which we relate to each other.”

And then, we bumped into the “elephant in the room”. (Jesus, the clichés!) He forcefully welcomed the NEC’s decision to establish a commission of inquiry into State Capture. “We want the truth to free us. The ANC must go back to what it was formed for.”

It wasn’t a firebrand’s speech, but Ramaphosa is no firebrand, not any more. Nonetheless, on radio and among some of my colleagues, the deputy president was given high marks. I’m not so sure. In any case, it’s no longer clear how much power Cosatu or the SACP wield in this country, so thoroughly have they handed over their mandates to the ruling party, thereby killing themselves in order for their leadership to become Cabinet ministers and M5 drivers. The country is still very much in the hands of Jacob Zuma and his syndicate; a moderate incrementalist constitutionalist like Ramaphosa hardly seems like a tonic. Indeed, it was hard to know what the Cosatu delegates were seeing in the dude, outside of his old links to the NUM and the movement at large. Vox pops revealed bland endorsement, and recitations of the party line.

Anyway, another colossus covered in fake barnacles, selling an inchoate message. The ANC’s version of Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable: knock on any of the massive figures who insist upon their own viability, and all you’ll probably hear is an echo. Meanwhile, men in fatigues assemble outside of the homes of the president’s critics, brandishing fire and pitchforks, screaming “hands off the Führer”.

Who do you think is likely to win this war? DM

Photo: President Jacob Zuma and Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa at the Freedom Day celebrations held in Manguzi, uMhlabuyalingana in KwaZulu-Natal under the theme ‘The year of OR Tambo: Together deepening democracy and building safer and crime free communities’, 27 April 2017. (Photo: GCIS)