How South Africa fell into the dull political loop of becoming boring

Remember when South Africa used to be fun? Remember when the memes slammed into each other like neutrons and electrons, causing small explosions every 15 seconds or so? Remember when there was a fancy term for corruption? Remember when optimism and pessimism cycled around each other in an endless loop, and didn’t always land on “this sucks”? 

Yeah, me neither. 

South Africa has become boring. I’m not talking about a lack of political spectacle — there is still Floyd Shivambu scurrying around the kleptocratic wilds looking for a political party to hide behind, and the general idiocy at MK, which is eating itself, like faecal parasites. There is still President Cyril Ramaphosa trying to assert himself on the local stage while playing a pliant mouse in the White House. There’s still the alleged drama within the alleged GNU, really just a coalition government and horse-trading forum where the Ramaphosa wing of the ANC and the house-trained wing of the DA bargain on behalf of their backers. 

Nor am I using “boring” as a simile for “blandly functional” — a sort of Scandinavian or Botswana-ish plodding along that results in something akin to stability. 

What I mean is boring in the true sense of the term — an endless drilling down into the depths of utter nothingness. Is anything happening in South Africa that could be meaningfully termed progress? If you’re a capitalist, is the economy growing? If you’re a socialist, is the economy becoming fairer? If you’re a communist, is anyone at all being sent to the gulag? I’d wager no. 

Apologists for the coalition government point out several areas where something seems to be moving. The Hawks, South Africa’s crack cops, appear to have pulled the proverbial thumb out, and have made some big arrests. The National Prosecuting Authority sort of/kind of won a case. The Transnet baddies have finally been arrested, even though most South Africans (outside of Cape Town) have forgotten what a train looks like. But even with these dogged, incremental improvements, crime and corruption are so embedded in the South African political, economic, social and cultural space that it hardly touches sides. 

Always accomplished sports-washers, South Africans can point to the excellent performance of our major teams in international competitions, but it’s worth remembering that tiny East Germany cleaned up at the Olympic Games during the Cold War, and no one in West Germany was risking their life to hop the wall into the German Democratic Republic (GDR). 

Culturally, the music and movie booms teased during the 90s and noughties have stalled out. There is no meaningful support of artists in this country, which means talent gets strangled at birth. The Sports and Culture minister can’t do sport and wouldn’t know culture if JM Coetzee’s entire bibliography was tattooed on his butt cheeks. The DTIC under Parks Tau has become exclusively focused on ensuring that American preferential trade deals remain in place, despite the fact that America thinks it’s being screwed by Lesotho. The department no longer assesses applications for film industry tax rebates, a standard industry stimulus that pertains in any market that hopes to draw filmmaking talent. Tau has single-handedly killed the industry, through sheer ignorance and lassitude. (There are also those sweet sweet Lotto tenders, which may or may not have cost deputy minister Andrew Whitfield his gig.) 

Sure, there are individual politicians who are truly gifted—I’m thinking Geordin Hill-Lewis in Cape Town, and perhaps a handful of other players here and there. But Helen “Supreme Karen” Zille has auditioned for the role of Johannesburg Executive Mayor, a role that has not been blessed with talent of late. Zille, a vet of State Capture and Ramaphosa’s first-term Race Grift Wars, feels like an absurd anachronism at this point. And the only people keeping Julius Malema alive are her allied American race warriors, who don’t seem to understand — because they don’t understand anything — that Malema has no constituency, and no power base.

So what’s next? Zuma for president? 

Sort of. Deputy President Paul Mashatile, at this point a sho0-in for the ANC’s next leader, did state capture before there was State Capture. As a ranking member of the Gauteng ANC mafia, he is adept at taking a piece of the action, and will only entrench and deepen South Africa’s kleptocratic tendencies. 

It’s all so boring. 

So where is the pushback? Part of the problem is that most people seem to be waiting for the coalition to click, and have deferred the responsibilities of citizenship to their proxies inside government. (See: the VAT fight.) But the coalition won’t click, as should be perfectly plain now. 

As this suggests, the bigger problem is an existential exhaustion. First, there was the fight against apartheid. Then, there was the fight against State Capture. Now, there is the fight against reverse anti-white apartheid. (I’m kidding, I’m kidding.) The population of this country has been stirred up into a big mound of lukewarm mieliemeal — cheap carbs, hold the gravy. 

So much of it comes down to the fact that the dispensation just hasn’t served the majority, not even close. 

I’m going to quote Peter Thiel here. Yup, Peter “I Pull The Heads Off Babies” Thiel: “When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time … and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”

No shit, homie. 

Most South Africans have tacitly turned against the system. The MK party’s surge at the polls was a protest vote that functioned as a large raised middle finger at the establishment. 

And so downward we bore, deeper into the Earth’s core than our defunct gold mines. 

It is perhaps ironic that South Africa’s most interesting politician just won the Democratic primary for mayor in New York City. I know, calling Zohran Mamdani South African is a stretch, but he was educated here, and one imagines part of his world-view was formed here. Maybe that’s why he can so clearly see through the guff, and understand that a politics of fairness, driven for and by the majority, is the only way forward. It’s telling that both Republicans and Democrats are flipping out over the guy, as of course would any South African politician. 

Mamdani’s platform leaves no room for grift, for the double-dealing and self-enrichment that has become the hallmark of postmodern politics. 

That’s why we’re boring, and why we’ll keep digging our own deep graves. And why Mamdani presents a way forward that South Africans would do well to consider. DM