It would be funny, if it were not such a damning indictment on South African society… the first 24 hours following President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement of a new Cabinet revealed the fixities and uncompromising positions that define this beleaguered country.
There was barely a sober reflection (among the exceptions were, this, this and this) that was not shaped by the ossified beliefs carried forward, intact and without the faintest hint of doubt, question or humility. The divisions in politics and society, and interpretations of culture and history, were thus seemingly unaffected by the changes to the country’s executive.
It is probably not a bad thing; perish the thought that we accept the world as it is and grant the new executive a free pass. Nonetheless, South Africans are sometimes as predictable as the seasons.
And then there is the stated objective expressed by Numsa’s Irwin Jim to make the country ungovernable (again) and the threat by EFF secretary-general Marshall Dlamini of a soft coup.
An almost forensic look at the responses over the 24 hours following Ramaphosa’s announcement shows that: politics is becoming increasingly personalised; rank-and-file ANC members seem to be humbled (somewhat); their DA counterparts are enjoying their gains (their most high-profile leaders being proud, emboldened, and a mite cringy); the EFF returning to form (not that they ever changed); Gayton McKenzie bringing up the rear (confirming that the foamy bits in the bathtub do indeed rise); Al Jama-ah leader Ganief Hendricks having a bubble bath; elsewhere bits of scoriae were being sworn in as members of Parliament, with the PAC and Patricia de Lille (once lovers), among others, benefitting from an expansive substitutes bench.
But for the absence of the EFF and MK party in the government of national unity – surely a good thing – everything seems almost perfectly in character and predictable. We can start anywhere.
Personalising politics
Scapegoating is a sure sign of populist politics, rhetoric and cant. Scapegoating relies on theatricality, visual representation and the personalisation of political leaders.
The standout example of this theatricality has been Julius Malema, and more recently, Jacob Zuma of the MK party. To elevate your image of sincerity, innocence, good intentions and indispensability, you have to project, on the highest stage, images of political opponents as personal threats, as being untrustworthy, corrupt or at the beck and call of shady backroom shenanigans.
Through this type of scapegoating, directed specifically at Ramaphosa, Zuma and Malema have consistently sought to link the president of the ANC to the apartheid security apparatus, to post-apartheid machinations by “white monopoly capital”, and the resolved/unresolved Phala Phala issue. This does not suggest that Ramaphosa is generally beyond criticism!
The EFF, perhaps more than the MK party, seem to be in shock after their relatively poor performance in the May election. It is a reminder of the difference between an elevated ideological self-image and what happens in the real-life world of everyday people. Let me try an analogy.
When viewed from 10,000m in the air, cars seem to crawl along a highway gently, easily and almost manageably, but step on to the side of the fast lane, and cars now speed past you and the effects are visceral. It takes your breath away, you’re stunned by the complexity of physics (specifically the viewing angle), and you can only contrive conspiracies, in almost comedic confusion, to make it all make sense. You want to laugh at them, but actually feel sorry for them.
A colloquialism has it that a broken clock is correct twice a day. Well, we’re in the digital age, and a broken clock is usually on the blink, showing different numbers and flickering graduations, or sometimes it simply goes blank, dies and you have to discard it…
And then there is the doozy. A most valuable lesson can be had from accepting that much of what was said and written by “revolutionaries”, from Thomas Sankara to Margaret Thatcher, was said several decades ago. The things they said, and presumably what they believed (then), should be considered in place and in times long gone, and we don’t quite know if they changed their minds over the decades that passed…
Smallanyana parties and their meaning(s)
The inclusion of the Freedom Front Plus, the Patriotic Alliance, Good, the Pan Africanist Congress and Inkatha was greeted with the customary loathing (Pieter Groenewald’s support for the death penalty, and his close association with the apartheid regime); perceived or real skollie elements (McKenzie); mild mockery (of Patricia de Lille); absurdity and horror of creeping Wahhabism (Al Jama-ah); uninspiring staidness (of Inkatha), and well, there is not really much one can say about the PAC…
The inclusion of these smallanyana parties means much more than the sum of their parts. These parties have helped the ANC (in terms of numbers), and pulled the Golm (Grand Old Liberation Movement) to the right.
If the smattering of smallanyana has pulled the Golm to the right, the DA secured Ramaphosa’s party in the middle of the road – with what’s left of roadkill. The DA, too, are a minority party; unless 21% is bigger than 40, 50 or 60%. It is true that the DA’s numbers are higher than the PA, PAC, Good, the IFP and Al Jama-ah. But they’re big enough to take themselves seriously, and they have…
The ANC’s followers have either been stunned into silence because of their significantly reduced majority, or they have gone to the mattresses in preparation of things more ominous.
The DA, in general, remind me of those nice people who visit Namaqualand in spring, who ooh and aah at the splendour, the millions of colours of the daisy carpet in the wild, then return home, manicure their gardens, weed out unwanted “alien” vegetation, lay out footpaths in neat curves, set the timer on sprinklers, then sit back, sip on a chilled Chardonnay and enjoy the view, the placidity, pride and satisfaction of their creation. There is no room for wild and wonderful, only pride, placidity, satisfaction and fine finger food, swirled down with a chilled wine.
Three incidents – overt and subtle claims of indispensability – have stood out following the DA’s entry to the executive. Helen Zille and Anthony James Leon have gone to great lengths to try to convince the world that they are indispensable.
Leon was direct; the ANC needed the DA. Leon said: “the DA was the sole guarantor of Ramaphosa’s election as president”.
Zille was more clever in reminding the world that the DA made things possible because they could have walked away. The subtext in both instances was that things would have been worse if the DA had not made it possible for the new order to emerge.
Leon Schreiber, the new minister of home affairs – a branch of government and the state that has been thoroughly messed up and which requires cautious listening and learning – sent out a tweet less than 24 minutes into his tenure, which said that (with the DA) “we got it right nationally and in KZN, but not in GP”.
All of this is grist for the mill of our comrades locked in romantic dreams of revolutionaries waving red flags as they enter towns and villages on hogsback, and soaking up the vacuous encomia of toothless peons and tenderpreneurs dressed in polyester suits, shiny plastic shoes and bearing bags and purses of European fashion houses. We can mock them, but we should take them seriously.
An axis of antis (anti-ANC, anti-DA, ant-GNU, anti-capitalism…) have stated their intention to make South Africa ungovernable, and threatened what has been described as a “soft coup”.
“We secured hollow political victory in 1994 without economic freedom. If the ANC thinks it’s going to insult us with its DA right Cabinet we will make this country ungovernable,” Irwin Jim of the National Union of Mineworkers (Numsa) has said. This is the Numsa leader who barely mustered a single-digit vote in the election of 2019 with the “grand-opening, grand-closing” of his Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party.
In alliance with the EFF, Jim said: “The EFF letter to the ANC is a correct political-ideological position… There is absolutely no need for the ANC to form a government with right-wing capitalist political parties that are anti-worker and union-bashing… The ANC should form a government with EFF, MK party and the UDM… Lock out the DA of Helen Zille and the Freedom Front Plus.”
All things considered, then, apart from the creation of a GNU, surely a positive move – we can only hope it lasts – the EFF, Zuma and Irwin Jim have simply ramped up the personalising of politics. The smallanyana parties – well, seat-warmers – and the DA are preparing to visit Namaqualand to fawn over the flowers growing wild and free in a terribly proscribed (not in my backyard) version of Chairman Mao’s Hundred Flowers Movement. DM
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