Picture: Rivage on Unsplash
This text contains pejorative terms that readers may find offensive. These terms are quoted in their original context, as used by the author.
RW Johnson, the self-appointed canary of the South African political coalface, is at it again. Speaking to Alec Hogg of BizNews, he states as a scare tactic that Zuma is being funded by Putin to destabilise South Africa away from the occidental sphere.
That Zuma is pro-East is no secret. But to conjecture this also means he is being funded by Kremlin would require better evidence than RW’s conjectures.
RW suffers from what I term Godlonton Syndrome. (Godlonton (1794-1884) was part of the 1820 English Settlers. He became the editor of the Grahamstown Journal. His major contribution was to whip raw with racial fear the emotions of white people regarding the so-called barbarians at the gates of British colonial settlement in the Cape Colony of the frontier era, and the pending disaster of the united "kaffir" national force, from Moshoeshoe of abeSotho to Sarhili of the Gcalekas.)
With my late wife, Helen, I once visited RW in his Constantia house. He talked down to us – rather to me, I guess – against politics of African nationalism, how there is a dire need in African politics for a new era of liberal values. Being a little wet behind my political ears, and radically black conscious with endemic hatred for white people talking down to me, I just had enough control not to lash out in anger. I got bored, and paid more attention to his wonderful Russian wife, whom I have subsequently discovered to be a better human being than Bill, as his friends call RW. That was our first and last visit with RW.
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Everyone thinks the ANC, the party of South Africa’s national liberation, will lose its majority these elections. I don’t think so. But it’ll lose tremendous support and end up hovering around the 51-53% mark. It’ll most probably lose its majority in Gauteng and KZN and go into coalition with the EFF to govern Gauteng, while Zuma’s MKP will surely be part of its coalition government in KZN. I have no problem with this nature of things – the ANC gradually losing its power in South Africa. It is as if the electorate are slowly preparing the ANC for getting used to the idea of losing power. Were it too radical, this loss of power, it might foment power-mongering desperation within its ranks. As we had a taste of, in the emergency lockdown era, the ANC does have a dormant authoritarian streak to it.
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In its quiet desperation, precariously groping for new ideas, the ANC has gone back to its founding roots. Nostalgia for past nobility is the only currency it can trade on now. The organisation was founded by the black elite, especially of faith-based leanings and traditional chieftaincy. It is by design that you noticed its leaders attending church gatherings throughout this past Easter, and visiting traditional leaders to renew their formative alliances.
The ANC, on the internet, is also doing marvellously well with the Three Hearts 🖤💚💛 Campaign. This is managing to catch even the attention of the youth, something the ANC has struggled to do post-’94.
You underestimate the ANC’s broad church appeal and perennial promise to renew itself at your own peril.
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Rumours of Zuma’s ill health might be detrimental for the ANC. South Africans not only love the underdog but have deep political empathy for the persecuted, based on our history. Zuma’s sickness, especially his death, could lift the support and vote for the MKP on 29 May way more than his tone of defiance and alleged hatred for Ramaphosa. Neither would the nonsense of political stumping, ready-to-wear paradoxes, worn-out clichés and obvious tricks of desperation in their riddled-with-infelicities manifesto do the trick. Zuma rode into his presidency by politically victimising himself. This wouldn’t work now. But his mortal victimhood through death would be a lasting gift he bestows on the MKP. They might use him not only as a martyr but as a guiding ancestor, in a similar manner to how the IFP is using Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.
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Speaking in the Freedom Day Public Lecture at the University of Venda, Advocate Ngcukaitobi talks of three valid points the critiques of our Constitution make against it: 1. Crisis of representation; 2. Africanisation (lack of); and 3. Social transformation (failure of).
He says our Constitutional system has failed to bring the direct representation most required in effective democratic systems. He goes as far back as the foundations of Western democracy to showcase this in saying the parliamentary system was a reaction of the elites in Athens against the messy demands of direct representation of the demos.
Now you find the parties like MKP wanting to go back to the parliamentary sovereignty system, against our constitutional system, which they feel is elitist for granting non-elected judges a last say on matters of national interests. The ultimate irony is that the parliamentary sovereignty is exactly what the drafters of our constitution wanted to abolish. They knew our history well, thus understood the mechanisation of the National Party oppressive reign. The NP, like the ANC under Zuma, as a party of majority in parliament, manipulated and intimidated the MPs to do the party-political dirty work. I guess that is the whole point for devious Zuma. He knows from experience how easy it is to manipulate the parliamentary system to tow the party-political line. He is the alleged master of state capture, as the Zondo Commission has heard. We were saved from his state capture by the judicial wing of our national governance when he had already rendered toothless the legislature and the executive. This is why he now also wants to render the judicial wing of our governance toothless.
I remember our kitchen talks with Helen who, coincidentally, when she was a junior lecturer in Constitutional Law at Stellenbosch University, and a member of the ANC, was part of the research team for the drafters of our Constitutional. She told me it was the conduct of the NP in Parliament during its reign that mostly informed the legal choices by the principals who drafted our constitution. Arthur Chaskalson was part of these drafters before he became the first chief justice of our new democratic state. Something flicked in my mind when, during the lecture by Ngcukaitobi, he was introduced as having once legally clerked under Justice Chaskalson.
Of course, Ngcukaitobi didn’t mention the MKP by name in his lecture, but it’s hard not to read the fact that his lecture was partly a reaction to his recent legal tussle with advocate Dali Mpofu who represented the MKP on the IEC court case against Zuma. Zuma argued successfully against being disbarred from standing for election due to his 15th month prison sentence. But the IEC has since been successful in lodging an appealing to the constitutional court. The case will be held sometime late May.
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No party gets free publicity like the MKP. Malema and his EFF are feeling left out. They forget that the EFF was also made by the media personnel, like RW, to be the bogeyman of the South African political scene. Now, there’s a new bogeyman in Nkandla’s dancing, performing political artist. Your RWs have a platform, especially with the foreign press, which takes their opinions as the gospel truth.
As the Aesop fable about an ass wearing a lion’s skin teaches: Fine clothes may disguise, but silly actions (voice) will disclose somebody’s foolishness. None is most applicable as the current SG (Secretary General) of the ANC, Fikile Mbalula. Why would they continue giving Zuma free publicity by calling him to account for his action. Doesn’t the ANC Constitution have a clause that campaigning for other political parties automatically expels you from the party. Now Zuma is gonna organise his supporters to camp outside Luthuli House for free publicity in a manner he does outside the courts of law. Despite his outer lion’s mane. Mbalula conceals something else within.
Be that as it may, the MKP seems to be imploding even before elections. I guess that nothing founded on unrighteous anger stands; it becomes a house divided against itself. No one knows what would happen if the MKP’s recently expelled Jabulani Khumalo decided to deregister the party, since it is registered under his own name.
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I have a free weekend. Must read and watch something worthwhile, now that the Shōgun series is finished. It has been entertaining me long enough for the past few weeks. No series has taught me more about the Japanese culture. I found the obsession with seppuku a little excessive, but everything else was informative in a very entertaining way. As a historical novelist, I find this up my alley. I try to do a similar thing regarding the history of the Cape Colony during the frontier era – to tell it from the Xhosa’s point of view of the zeitgeist. I don't remember encountering the seppuku narrative hegemony from the book, Shōgun by James Clavell, the series is based on. In the end I understood why they overplayed it. They pinned the story on the demands of loyalty and on the “nobility” of taking your own life, should you betray that loyalty. I seem to remember the book overplaying the religious conflict between the Catholics and Protestants – or that is how I read it then. The series also fed on the popularity of Martin Scorsese’s Silence. That was more historically accurate, based on the book by Shūsaku Endō. What I never really understood from the books, and now the series, is whether the rivalry of the Jesuits and Mendicant Orders was what led to the expulsion of all Christian missionaries, and the execution of converts by the Tokugawa shogun. Or, as some say, was the Japanese culture too strong and entrenched in the people’s identity for Christianity to be attractive as a new way of life for the Japanese? (Comparison with the Xhosa situation in the 18th and 19th centuries are natural for me here. Soga, the first Xhosa to be educated in the West, says that the identity of the Xhosa was too strong for Christianity to take hold, until they lost their subsistence after the Great Cattle Killings.) In the recent series, Shōgun, the Christian converts seemed to be controlling the plot, in particular my crush, Mariko-sam (Anna Swai). That is not how I recall things from the book, but I love the prominence the series makes of the women’s roles. I think the book is more aligned with the patriarchal Japanese culture. I found the Anjin-san (Cosmo Jarvis) too abstruse and annoying in the series, whereas in the book he was more of a calm and wise narrating voice.
I think I am gonna try and binge-watch Baby reindeer this weekend. I have not watched psychological thrillers in a while, and the Scots do them superbly. It is a good, cold weekend to have a Scottish brogue on in the background. And it also assists my writing, since I am at the stage when Soga is suffering Glasgow’s weather infelicities of the 19th century. I must cook samp and beans to eat with ulusu (offal), part of which I can prepare haggis-style, with whisky sauce, and bake into a pie for our Sunday lunch tomorrow.
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One wonders what the curmudgeonly sideshows of Zuma’s political mirrors, like Ace Magashule, Hlaudi Motsoeneng and others, hope to achieve with their twisted reflections and random echoes. Mzwandile Manyi, Carl Niehaus and others have chosen a quieter and less dramatic way of descending into their political graves by joining the EFF. They’re all moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration for having been deprived of their alleged looting spree springs. I can see how this, for the self-entitled elite, would foment a blind desire to strike out. But against what? Ramatrass (they call him), their convenient scapegoat? Still, one has to admire their idiotic, teeth-clenched determination.
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The crown for all-pervading, unintelligible, arrogant self assurance and tone-deaf eloquent stupidity in this election season, goes to the DA. Steenhuisen is the prodigious boy after his mother’s (Helen Zille) heart. Mercurial, if often superfluous, rhetoric has at least been their political merchandise in the past. Now it seems even that has slipped away from them. All they’re hanging on to is the Godlontorn Syndrome and trying to steal the thunder of the FF Plus.
We hear the good black conservative Lennit Max has resigned from them, citing incidences of racism and deception by the FF Plus Western Cape premier candidate, Corné Mulder. Did he perhaps think the crocodiles are in a business of helping their prey cross rivers?
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Meantime, the EFF seems to be imploding due to the authoritarian hand of Malema, also. I doubt that even if the almost mystical power they designate to the WMC will save them now. But I am sure it won’t stop Malema from accusing the WMC for his demise when the empty words his cult members turn to for solace fail him.
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There is a tone of desperation in Holomisa’s political speeches, like a man who is urgently aware that this election may mean an end of his political party (UDM) if they don’t clinch some huddled coalition political deal somewhere somehow. He is scared the UDM might not get a seat in Parliament. And, too late, is running as the UDM’s Premier candidate also in the Eastern Cape. Ten years ago he was more relevant there, the Eastern Cape voters would have welcomed his intervention. I am afraid the horse has bolted now.
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Even Mbeki, the master of the obscure politics of equivocation, has come out of his political carapace and lethargic cynicism to finish the battle with the prancing king, Zuma. It was evident during his last Unisa lecture, on behalf for the Thabo Mbeki Foundation(TMF), that he has warmed to the leadership of Ramaphosa, though he had been critical of him during the Phala Phala dollars-in-the-mattress incident. Now he is seen all over Soweto campaigning for the ANC, and, with Naledi Pandor, is apparently due to do the putsch in the Cape Flats on the eve of the elections.
The Palestinian issue is a gift that keeps on giving for the ANC in the Cape. It has afforded them renewed relevance. To be fair, Mbeki has always advocated for the perennial and transcendental idea of ANC cadre renewal. He obviously feels now the time for the idea has come. Uncharacteristic of him, he fell short of apologising for the demise the ANC government put the country under.
As the ancient Roman statesman, Cicero, saw it: “The times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” The TMF is doing its bit by republishing in book form the popular Friday Letters he used to write on ANC Today as the president of the organisation. As someone who also used to contribute to the ANC Today publication, when I still wholeheartedly believed in the bona fides of the Organisation, I recently tried reading a few articles. They left a bitter taste on my intellectual tongue.
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The ACDP is in the God complex business, selling the transcendent political promise based on religious superstition. Superstitious, because it is based on unthinking faith. Unthinking, commodified, faith-based lingo of the USA faux-aspirational white conservatism is their merchandise and the glue that bonds their cultish membership. Cultish organisations, like the ACDP and EFF, rely on the precarity and sociopolitical insecurities of their followers. They act to provide a sense of community and shelter by avoiding the demands of maturity. The pastor/elder or commissar does all the thinking. The only command for the membership is, “Follow me.”
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It is easy in South African politics to blame the ANC, or the likes of Zuma and other preterits kings of the superfluous, while failing to understand that the fundamental root of our national problems is extreme inequality and moral degeneration. This is what corrupts our politics, hinders economic growth and stifles social mobility. It fuels crime, violent conflict and squanders talent (Mkhwebane and Jooste) in politics and business. It does not only thwart our developmental potential, but fundamentally undermines the foundations of our society. I don’t know why the elites in particular, who have everything to lose from triumphant inequality and moral degeneration, do not see this