When I was a kid, my parents gave me a little box of magic tricks. It had everything an aspiring magician could ask for. A set of dice, little ropes, a deck of cards and of course, a magic wand.

I never quite grasped the necessary sleight of hand. Instead, I mastered one terrible card trick that I would perform to my aunts, uncles and parents who would smile politely and feign wonder. I knew the trick was no good and they knew it too, and yet we persevered in this strange magical charade. It was easier than facing up to the hard truth that I was never destined to be a magician.

I saw a similarly awful bit of magic recently, performed by the Limpopo MEC for health, Dr Phophi Ramathuba. Like me, she had her captive audience, except hers was a gaggle of middle management shuffling behind her on her tour of Bela-Bela hospital and a bed-bound patient from Zimbabwe.

Ramathuba publicly berated the patient for “killing her health system” and in a spectacular display of gaslighting, claimed the patient was in fact “abusing” her. In her final flourish, she turned to her audience to bleat some Zuma-esque statistics before demanding that the patient be held captive and not discharged until her bill was paid.

The deception, in case you missed it, is to lay the blame for our crumbling health system at the feet of undocumented migrants rather than exorbitant tenders for PPE worth half a billion rand. In magic, this is known as misdirection.

The key to good misdirection is shifting the audience’s attention to something interesting, but unrelated. Performed correctly, they’ll be unaware that they have been manipulated, believing their attention has been precisely where it needed to be the whole time. In politics, this is called bullshit.

Whatever you want to call it, Ramathuba’s a bad magician. She knows it and deep down, her audience must know it too. Still, it’s easier than facing up to the hard truth, that deep-rooted corruption in the ANC is responsible for the decay of every major sector of public services and it’s only getting worse.

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The esteemed paediatrician Tim de Maayer called it in an open letter just a couple of months ago, nearly making the good deeds of his entire career miraculously disappear in the process.

Aside from the total dereliction of every value expected from a member of the caring profession, what made Ramathuba’s tirade devious was how obviously it was staged.

Watch it again. Ramathuba has previously been called “out of touch and out of place” but it seems she has a finger firmly on the pulse of a nation reeling from the aftermath of the zama zama scandal. Movements such as Operation Dudula and ActionSA are finding momentum and many South Africans and non-South Africans living here are worried about this.

The ANC is worried too, but for different reasons.

In the coming years, the ANC faces an existential crisis as it continues to haemorrhage electoral support to its rivals. In 2024, it risks dropping to 40% of the electoral vote. With Herman Mashaba gaining ground, members of the ANC from the very top to the bottom of the barrel, are increasingly pandering to and perpetuating the public appetite for xenophobia.

If Ramathuba were serious, she’d be lecturing her colleague Dr Aaron Motsoaledi instead, grilling him publicly about his failings to address the problem at our borders despite serving more than three years as Minister for Home Affairs.

Of course, where lies the benefit for anyone complicit in the ANC shitshow in pursuing such a constructive course of action? All this would serve to do is pull back the curtain on the whole stinking charade.

It’s far easier to create a bogeyman, to attack the weak and disenfranchised as they lie defenceless in a hospital bed. Sure, you might alienate a few of us with concern for our fellow human beings, but sowing seeds of hatred yields tenfold.

As a result of the example set by Ramathuba, we will likely see worsening treatment of migrants, both documented and undocumented in our public health system. Others, fearful of this now legitimised xenophobia, will not seek the emergency medical treatment they are entitled to under section 27(3) of the South African Constitution.

South Africa cannot both pretend to be the shining beacon of the continent and complain when others are drawn to its light. If this country is to thrive, it cannot adopt an official policy of sticking its fingers in its ears while simultaneously ignoring its neighbours and blaming them for its ills.

As an ideology, it’s a non-starter. Borders by their very nature are porous and as we’ve seen, building a giant wall isn’t as easy as it sounds.

It might serve the country better if our politicians were willing to look inward at why our health system is on its knees, but the ANC follows the playbook of the modern political swamp to a tee. The aim is not to serve but to say whatever is required to hold on to power for as long as possible. DM