TOM EATON: No great expectations in this bleak house of candles and crooks

On Sunday, as I sat meditating in the deep tranquillity that comes when you have neither electricity nor running water, I realised I was managing my expectations well.

These things happen, I told myself. Neglected water pipes burst. Necrotic ANC politicians deindustrialise the country. These are immutable laws of nature. Getting angry about them would imply I believed things should be different; that water pipes are indestructible; that the ANC is capable of doing anything but eating; that crumbling states, ruled by idiots, cowards and thieves, somehow keep supplying electricity and running water.

Since I do not believe these things, I remained much like the famous thinkers of ancient Greece: philosophical, washing myself by scraping oil off my skin with a bronze knife, and unable to watch Bridgerton. But as I sat and listened to the silence of entropy, I had to admit that, perhaps like many of us, I had managed my expectations too well.

I remembered how shocked I’d been when Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma supervised the ANC’s first corruption scandal, paying about R50m in today’s money for Sarafina 2. Now, if it’s not R500m it barely registers as a scandal. It doesn’t even occur to me to ask why she’s still a cabinet minister.

I remembered my outraged incredulity when the state first introduced rolling blackouts. Now, shifting from stage 2 load-shedding to stage 1 feels like a genuine win.

I remembered all the gaslighting sock puppets, such as Jessie Duarte and Mac Maharaj, telling us that the arms deal was squeaky clean, that Jackie Selebi was honesty personified, that those trains would totally fit on SA tracks, that nobody had ever met a Gupta, and that it was entirely normal that Tina Joemat-Pettersson had sold the country’s strategic oil reserve for three magic beans and a handful of shiny buttons.

Cyril Ramaphosa just has to allude in passing to the theoretical suspension (on full pay, depending on their seniority) of vastly corrupt ANC members, and he sounds like Franklin D Roosevelt telling us we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The bar, I had to admit, is now so low that it would be underground if the contract to bury it hadn’t been awarded to a nephew of an MEC who took the money and scarpered.

And yet on Sunday I found myself surprised once again, just like back in the late 1990s when we thought our national sports were football and rugby and not, as it turned out, serving as human doormats for our ruling class and then being outraged when they wipe their feet on us.

Because on Sunday I read, with that old Sarafina 2 thrill, that the state has decided to centralise its Covid-19 vaccine rollout plan because it doesn’t want a repeat of the looting orgy that happened in the provinces when they got their hands on the personal protective equipment billions.

Let that sink in for a moment, down through the hard-baked earth of our collective numbness. The state has just publicly announced, apparently without shame or discomfort, that the people it has tasked to run our provinces will steal any amount of money left lying near them for long enough.

However, since it also can’t police them, and won’t fire them, it has decided to control the scope of inevitable theft — or at least make sure it’s going to be done only by a few discreet experts — by keeping it away from the rubes in the provinces who, being venal morons, inevitably trip up and get exposed by the media.

Readers of this column will know I’ve insisted for some time that the ANC is not a government but an extraction machine. But on Sunday I had to wonder if we’re seeing a glimpse of the next and final transformation of the ANC, now that the money has all been spent or stolen and nobody is accepting its IOUs any more.

Centralising the vaccination programme to keep money away from the provinces sounds pragmatic, even proactive, but it is simply palliative care, just like Bheki Cele arresting surfers and Eskom sending us friendly reminders to stock up on candles.

Which is why I don’t think it’s impossible that in its final form the ANC will become a sort of perverted parody of a hospice offering end-of-life treatment for SA; endlessly expressing shock and dismay and sadness; insisting that nobody could have done more; that it’s so, so sorry but it’s got to catch the last flight out of Waterkloof, so if you could just switch off the lights and the water when you leave and — oh, look, they’re already off.

Gosh. When did that happen?

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.

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