WHEN President Jacob Zuma fired respected finance minister Nhlanhla Nene in December 2015, the markets responded mercilessly, forcing him into a bitter retreat.
To this day, he maintains his anger at being strong-armed into sacrificing that clumsy little fellow Des van Rooyen.
"It cannot be right," is something I imagine he has fumed repeatedly.
He sought, and achieved, partial vengeance by protecting his friend, South African Airways chairwoman Dudu Myeni, despite her supporting role in Nene’s dismissal, even going so far as to attend a sham of a ceremony at the embattled airline’s offices, uttering veiled taunts and making promises completely at odds with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s desire to restructure the board of the airline.
Simultaneously, under his authority, the Hawks were allowed to conduct a malicious campaign against Gordhan, already under pressure from ratings agencies.
These slippery victories restored Zuma’s position and his place in the minds of the provinces. Markets, the law and the media do not feature in how he sees the world, who he dreams of being in it and what he thinks he is entitled to do.
The elections last week were a gift of respite against waves of events designed to criminalise the state.
Unlike firing finance ministers on illegitimate grounds, or positioning officials willing to use the word "transformation" to disguise stealing or perverting the state security or prosecutorial apparatus, elections are not open to interpretation. This explains the noticeable absence of previously eager backwater peasants leaping to the president’s defence in the wake of this embarrassing result. They simply cannot conceive of what has happened.
The forward-thinking world wished for the result it witnessed — this icy reflex of resistance, this declaration that an accumulating force of citizens no longer subscribe to deceptive, traditional romanticism, patriarchy and patronage — proving the space occupied by the rural hustler in contemporary politics is rapidly diminishing.
How desperately humiliating it was for Zuma who, just a few weeks ago, was practicing his witchcraft lobbying in Nelson Mandela Bay, calling opposition parties "snakes". With loss etched into his greying face, he pursed his lips and employed the customary — and very irritating — throat clearing, only to be ambushed by the ghost of Christmas past.
This has not escaped London’s broadsheets that until last week were seemingly resigned to reporting only SA’s tragic controversy narrative. It has been a long time since such explicit admiration was expressed for the country. This is not because the West hates the ANC, but because those who see forward — those who understand and are willing to accommodate the advanced pace of the world — consider independent thought an act of solidarity.
But more than anything else, including this curious, empathic scrutiny of the private choices of black middle-class professionals, these elections exposed to the world that imposters have polluted the ANC and illustrated a clear divide between this administration and everyone else.
It has all gone crocodile-skin pointy shoes and North West housing tenders, trashy hip-hop music, big bellies in tight T-shirts and quad bikes driven by heavyweight maniacs over the hills of KwaZulu-Natal.
It revealed crony-capitalist, forked-tongue propagandists and hysterical cowards alike — the latter particularly on Saturday night at the official election announcement, when a few female cabinet ministers entertaining extended flirtations with mental illness had to be physically restrained from each other following the silent antirape protest.
But these elections only promise potential, not yet success, because they will be successful only when the ANC — or what is left of it — admits that it does not belong to Zuma or his way of thinking or his family or friends, and that it is not prepared to allow the country to degenerate into gypsy feudalism. In this age of Elon Musk and the shared economy, we thought: it can never, ever be accepted that a president stands up in Parliament and claims his economy is rubbish because of the global financial crisis nearly 10 years ago.
We know now, like many other things, that it was not.
• Reader works for an energy investment and political advisory firm.
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