Villain of the Year: It feels like déjà vu, but that’s because Zuma can’t let go of the perch

Jacob Zuma

The loser-in-chief refuses to disappear. No matter how lame the platform, no matter how hackneyed the grievance, the former president of South Africa stands up in front of a crowd and in those inimitable tones – weakened by age and cupidity – trots out the same old crap he’s been peddling since he left office.

Daily Maverick readers know a villain when they see one, and in the past 30 years, no single individual has rendered more harm to the republic than Msholozi. The country still struggles with the damage wrought by State Capture, as water shortages render millions thirsty, and regular electricity remains a luxury item even after load shedding has been “fixed”.

Zuma’s successors have hardly been perfect, and nor are they free of the rot that his presidency entrenched, but they have nonetheless found in the wreckage a truism that his nightmarish reign reinforced: it’s far easier to break than it is to fix.

Although barred from serving in Parliament because he’s a convicted criminal, Zuma has found political resurrection with the vastly dof uMkhonto Wesizwe party, or MK. Inserting himself into what would otherwise have been a nonentity, he used the rage and disappointment of South Africa’s most neglected constituents to inflict damage on the ANC – while demanding he remained a member.

Freed from the fetters of politesse, he began trafficking in the usual 21st-century populism: mulish revanchism. It’s nearly impossible to figure out what MK wants, apart from appending itself to the gangster state and becoming the formal leader of the informal economy.

Sadly, few people in South African history have had more opportunity to serve its disaffected masses than Zuma. He did less than nothing then, and he’ll do less than nothing now. He remains an economic illiterate, a chauvinist and a man so devoid of imagination that he can’t politic beyond the contours of his belly.

Truth is, during his time in power, Zuma was the tamest foot soldier of the White Monopoly Capital he professed to loathe, until someone convinced him that there was a better, more efficient way to steal. He was never Robin Hood, just a hood – even the people of Nkandla, his homestead, refused to vote for him.

Zuma’s popularity is circular – he creates victims and then claims he can save them. It’s an efficient way to maintain a constituency. It helps that he bangs on about his own victimhood, a one-man whining machine that never rests. Laughably, his MK party has a large presence in Parliament, but can and will do nothing to improve the circumstances of those it claims to serve. No amount of revisionism will ever be able to remove the slime from Zuma’s historical memory.

Thembi Simelane

There are bigger thieves in Parliament, but few are more brazen than the former minister of justice and constitutional development, Thembi Simelane.

As revealed in a series of exposés published in Daily Maverick, Simelane used the fraudulent proceeds from the busted VBS Bank to buy a coffee shop. But not only that. After a forensic review of her retail habits, it’s been proven that she has been on a semipermanent spending spree, blowing far in excess of what, well, Elon Musk would be able to sustain.

Obviously crooked, Simelane has been shameless in her denials. Her feckless boss, President Cyril Ramaphosa, shuffled her from Justice to Human Settlements, where she can continue to steal.

But for many South Africans, Simelane has become an example of the depth of corruption the ANC has plumbed over the past three decades. She simply has no limits. The luxury goods she bought with her fraudulent gains are so over the top that they suggest some form of mental impairment. Certainly, they enter the realm of moral derangement, where the ANC ruling class is so disassociated from the plight of average South Africans that they just don’t care.

Simelane’s behaviour is atrocious. She should not be anywhere near government, let alone the Cabinet. But she is also a child of her party’s unofficial impunity machine. Ramaphosa must fire her, and she must face the law.

For South Africa to move forward, Simelane must become an anachronism. For now, she is merely unlucky – one of the few parliamentarians dumb enough to get busted. Steal better next time. Because we’re watching.

Elon Musk

The human equivalent of a bowl of porridge surgically modified into the shape of a man, Musk has spent billions of dollars transforming himself into a walking meme.

He’s had a big year. After buying Twitter and transforming it into SS Stormfront Daily, he used it to become the white right’s knight in shining bedsheets. Puerile, ill-informed and as graceless as a strip club MC, Musk spent vast sums backing Donald Trump in his third at-bat for the White House. His investment has paid off, but perhaps not in the way he imagined.

Riding both his coattails and his dime are a legion of shouty podcast-adjacent errand boys, many of them more proficient at the kill-or-be-killed mores of Trumpworld. He may assume that he is the puppeteer, until he finds that the discomfort in his underpants region is an orange hand that refuses to let go.

Like Zuma, Musk is an avatar of the angry and dispossessed. He can wield a meme with the best 14-year-old, and he knows well the language of the rageful political eunuchs that form the white right. These are the men who now define the contours of our world – 24/7 grievance machines.

One day, perhaps very soon, Americans will come to the realisation that oligarchs like Musk are not the solution to the problem, but the cause of it. As he and a fellow tech bros try to tear down the “woke administrative state”, he may find himself short of 1,000 bodyguards or two. He even may miss the old days, when he made iPads on wheels and space dildos. And he best not anger the emperor, whose thumb forever twitches downwards.

But remember this: Musk can’t unrig the system. He is the system. And that has to end. DM