The fortress built around Cyril Ramaphosa in the run-up to his election as ANC president, and dramatically strengthened after he was sworn in, was impressive indeed. A grand monument to denial, it seemed for a time impenetrable. The walls, forged in hope and belief, stood twenty foot high. And, inside, Ramaphosa ruled as King over those who submitted to his worldview: that just over the next horizon, the sun would break.
But you cannot build a single fortress in a vast, warring landscape and not expect the external universe to slowly but steadily impose itself on you. Just as a bubble cannot last long in the sea, before it is popped and re-integrated into the deep blue.
All around Ramaphosa’s Jericho, chaos reigns. It is irresistible. The walls are crumbling and hope and belief have been the first things to gush from the cracks; while reality steadily seeps inside. In truth, for all his defiance, Ramaphosa’s isolated Nirvana was always under siege. And his was a siege mentality. He feigned expanding the city but the empire of anarchy was never going to relinquish its hard-earned territory to a usurper. Regardless, he was never up for the fight.
R1bn is a staggering amount of money, but no one can really tell. Money has lost its meaning in SA today. Just as numbers have. One of the first casualties of the war on rationality, is the loss of perspective. A million is a billion is a trillion.
Patch together those snippets of information on how Ramaphosa spent this fortune in optimism, and you can maybe account for R50m. On a good day, R100m. An EFF MP here, a spin doctor there. Which leaves the small matter of R900m. It went somewhere. It bought something. We will likely never know what, exactly. And, we are told, it shouldn’t concern us either. The golden rule of Jericho, after all, is that always one must believe in Ramaphosa’s best intentions.
There is a price to pay for that. Any citizen of Jericho is now morally bound to Ramaphosa, whatever his intentions. And so, all through the city, there are posters on display. They read: “This city was founded on belief, and the price was worth it. It was an investment in pragmatism, not principle.” The great monument rests on this compromise, and all inside inevitably find themselves not just defending expediency but, often unwittingly, increasingly complicit in the consequences for democratic values and ideals, that flow from that sacrifice.
Curiously, Ramaphosa hasn’t actually resisted chaos and anarchy. Rather, he seems to have added a fair amount of accelerant, much of his own creation
Ramaphosa himself says he is unaware of how the money was spent. Oblivion is the other golden rule. He was unaware of how big a problem state capture was. He was unaware of Nhlanhla Nene’s various meetings with the Guptas, or of his intention to resign. He was unaware of why his deputy president was in Russia on sick-not-so-sick leave. He was unaware of VBS Mutual Bank looting. And, of course, he was unaware of the R500,000 donation from Bosasa, to his election campaign.
Now, as it turns out, he was unaware of how R1bn was spent in its entirety, where it all came from and where it all went. That makes sense, on one level: if blind belief is a prerequisite for admission to Jericho, then ignorance is the natural by-product — one must suspend one’s critical faculties to take up residence within the city walls — because unless doused in ignorance, reality will eat belief for breakfast every time.
Stripped away, that simple necessity reveals the truth. It is an ugly, uncomfortable one: for all the pretence, Jericho is no different a society from that which exists outside the walls. And Ramaphosa was born of its chaos, not order.
Chaos and anarchy are two misleading words in SA today. Their connotations evoke ideas of violent upheaval. But the ANC, as is its wont, has fashioned them after its own attitude: they are a slow, attritional business. Corrosive more than instantaneous, but no less effective in the final analysis. Incrementally but unrelentingly, they have devoured people, ideas and institutions indiscriminately. And they have been at work on the walls of Jericho since the first illusionary stone was laid.
Curiously, Ramaphosa hasn’t actually resisted the poisonous erosion. Rather, he seems to have added a fair amount of accelerant to it, much of his own creation. On corruption he has poured Bosasa; on economically ruinous policies, he has added expropriation without compensation, the National Health Insurance fund and prescribed assets; on weak leadership he has mixed in cowardliness, unable to stand firm on the public-sector wage bill — indeed, to stand at all, choosing rather to bend the knee himself. It is almost as if he wants the walls to collapse. Then again, as I say, perhaps the fortress was only ever an illusion anyway.
A city that is to exist in the real world, needs real foundations. You cannot house people on rhetoric alone. It requires structures built of stronger materials. Entropy will inevitably make a mockery of sentiment. While promises and allusions might persuade one of the plans, an actual city requires blood, sweat and tears. Even then, in this environment, it would likely only stand for a short while.
The greatest victims in political pyramid schemes, just as with economic ones, are those who believe enough to invest their pensions in it
You simply cannot have fiefdoms in SA, not in a country governed by egalitarianism and majoritarianism. All must be equal. Or equally compromised. Jericho cannot be allowed to exist. Hence all the wailing and trumpeting outside. It must be brought down. And it will.
You get the sense, when it finally falls completely, no-one will breathe a greater sigh of relief than Ramaphosa himself. This was all imposed on him. He liked the title bestowed upon him by the citizenry — “the great redeemer” — but always the chaos outside beckoned to him; and always he wanted to return to it. It was in his blood, after all.
The greatest victims in political pyramid schemes, just as with economic ones, are those who believe enough to invest their pensions in it. As it turns out, the architects of this kind of fraud generally make it out of the resultant mess better off than before it. At the very least, they got to spend all that money, other people’s money. But for the investor themselves, there is only misery. Robbed of both their money but their belief. It a double economic and emotional blow.
What will the citizens of Jericho do once fully re-integrated into the empire of chaos? Wander the streets no doubt, looking for a new King. No doubt they will find one. They always do. It just takes a while for their emotional reserves to be replenished. Will they have learnt anything? Unlikely. Jericho is El Dorado, a lost city of gold that exists more in the mind than on earth.
Any magician will tell you they never reveal their secrets. If they do, the illusion is shattered. You know it is trick but if you do not understand its mechanics, some small part of you invests in the idea of magic. And that’s the wonder of it. Only magic doesn’t work in a democracy. Transparency, accountability and oversight demand every trick be publicly revealed for what it is. Poor Ramaphosa. SA’s greatest illusionist simply can’t operate in front of that particular audience.
David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Ramaphosa is about make a whole city vanish. Only not by magic; a cold, hard, brutal reality will do it all for him.
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