TOM EATON: Keep your expectations so low only a Sona can find them

The state of the nation (Sona) address will be disappointing because it always is. This is our collective agreement. Those are the rules.

I don’t know why we do it, but we do and it’s always the same. For a single evening, we allow ourselves to disconnect from our stoic, defensive pragmatism and our hopes of glacial, incremental change, and throw ourselves headlong down the super-tube of political escapism.

Having heard nothing but a dry and dusty monotone for decades, we suddenly expect towering oratory. Having spent a year listening to President Cyril Ramaphosa try to convince us that his government really does know how to generate electricity, we suddenly expect him to announce that every citizen will be issued their own unicorn with saddlebags full of gold doubloons.

Which is why, once it’s all over, the post-Sona interviews are so gloomy. No unicorns, mutter the pundits. Not nearly enough doubloons, grumble the opposition politicians. And then everyone goes back to expecting almost nothing from the ANC government and cheers up a little bit.

Well, not me, my friends. Because this year I’ve decided to skip the rollercoaster of broken Sona dreams and instead headed fast towards cheerfulness by keeping my expectations anchored firmly in reality and as close to zero as is possible, without becoming a nihilistic killjoy. And on Thursday night I’ll be sitting pretty.

As pundits complain that Ramaphosa isn’t providing enough details of how he plans to turn the economy around, I’ll be exulting: “There he is! They allowed him out! And he isn’t even trying to get the attention of a camera operator to zoom in on a small handwritten sign that says: ‘Help! I Am Being Held Against My Will’. This is progress!”

As they fret over the limited scope of his reforms, I will celebrate that we’re calling them reforms at all. After all, you know that you have left behind a truly terrible place if not deliberately breaking things is considered reform.

And as they express surprise at his national approval rating of 62%, wondering why such a cautious and relatively ineffectual president is so popular, I will shake my fist and denounce that figure as hopelessly too low. I mean, if I were adrift in the middle of the Atlantic and the only thing between me and doom was a rotting log that kept gently rolling this way and that, every so often saying it was shocked, I would give that log at least four out of five stars on TripAdvisor, with the comment “Would definitely cling to again”. I might expect very little from Ramaphosa, but I am not ambivalent about him. It’s him or it’s nobody.

Speaking of nobodies, Sona can also be a lot more cheerful if you see it not as a procession of soon-to-be-broken promises but rather a grand day out for SA’s smaller parties; a brief moment in the evening sun in which they can stand on a red carpet and be asked their opinions, almost as if people care about them.

Inevitably, some will try to exploit it. The EFF, for example, has promised to do its best to get thrown out of parliament, a beautifully elegant double-whammy of a strategy: first prove to your paranoid cult that you are, as you keep claiming, revolutionary martyrs being persecuted by a cabal of Indians, whites, journalists or whichever lot are the monster de jour; and then use the ensuing orgy of media coverage to make everyone forgets that the EFF is supported by only 3% of eligible voters.

The rest, however, will just be happy to be there, such as the DA’s John Steenhuisen, who will be relishing the opportunity to explain what his party stands for this week. Pieter Groenewald of the FF+, emboldened by a good showing in last year’s election, will no doubt be inspired to dream of the day he delivers his own Sova (state of the volkstaat address) after a fly-past from a crack team of hadedas and a 21-Mauser salute.

The leadership of the ACDP will bask in serious questions about serious policy matters, a blessed respite from the queries that usually crowd the party inbox: “I walked in on my wife reading a non-fiction book. Should I divorce her immediately or first try to cast out the demons?”

And just imagine the wonder of walking on the red carpet for the UDM, COPE or the PAC, knowing that there are more humans who have written doctoral theses on the harmonics of the mating calls of sea otters than have voted for you, but you’re there all the same. Bliss.

Yes indeed. Sometimes the state of a nation just depends on how you look at it. And at which end of the carpet you’re standing.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.