The ANC’s relationship with death has always been schizophrenic. There is the grand national pageantry, when party icons and heroes die. And then there is the public, large swathes of which die in record numbers, in a wide range of brutal ways. These, however, live on as statistics, private and hidden away, if they are commemorated at all.
The ANC has been the proximate cause of so much death. Problems such as corruption and financial maladministration are regularly quantified. But not death itself, at least not in any grand sense, and certainly not when it comes to the ANC’s political culpability. Rarely, if ever, is a direct link made between the various ANC administrations and people who die as a consequence of those governments. There are some astounding sums to be done on this front, but where to begin?
HIV/Aids and nevirapine, Life Esidimeni, Marikana, political assassinations, inter-ANC violence and now Covid-19. How many of these deaths can the ANC be held directly responsible for? You feel there should be a number. There isn’t.
And those represent only some of the most egregious incidents, where the ANC government is directly and unquestionably implicated. But there are others. There are road deaths due to poor infrastructure, death by poverty, death through failed public care, in hospitals and clinics, death through negligence and the murder rate. Here, it is harder to draw a direct link, but that there is a link you can be sure.
No-one can ever say: “The ANC has killed this many people.” No-one ever tries. There is, however, a number. And it’s a big one. Here is another question: How many ANC voters has the ANC killed? You can be sure its own constituency has been hardest hit.
Would it make a difference if there were a number? Is death enough to convince people the party is too reckless and callous to govern? Unlikely. And it would have no effect on the ANC either.
SA fatalism is a curious thing. It warrants little attention but there is an argument to be made that it determines so much behaviour in those who govern and the governed.
Death is as much a part of life as potholes. It’s just there. It happens. It’s terrible and awful and everywhere but also inevitable. We move on from death long before we analyse or assess it. How it has come to pass that corruption — as grotesque a monster as it is — almost solely defines our sense of moral outrage, remains something of a mystery. No government responsible for this much death should be standing. But the ANC endures. The ANC is just the way of things in a land without a bottom line.
There are politicians out there in the world, animated by things such as compassion and empathy. You won’t find them in the ANC. To be fair, it is a recipe for madness. There is so much death, were someone to actually care, they would unravel. It is too much to process, the horror of it all.
But there is not even an inkling of remorse in the ANC’s ranks. You never get the sense anyone in the party is hanging their head in shame. You never see any tears. There are none to shed. Death, for the ANC, is nothing personal. It’s just a by-product of the SA situation, of history or inequality, but never policy. It has nothing to do with the ANC. Death is something that happens to other people.
This gap, between the decisions the ANC makes (and fails to execute) and the consequences, is how the ANC survives, psychologically. And it is why the party appears more sociopathic than sympathetic. Policy is the rhetorical safety blanket the ANC douses any emotional fire with. “We have a strategy,” the party says, as it gazes out across the body-strewn battlefield.
It is inside that gap, between ideas and reality, where the ANC lives. When reality intrudes, it retreats further and further into the abstract. It is next to impossible to pin it down. When you can — when there is a Life Esidimeni or Marikana — its response is not emotional, but bureaucratic — a process or a commission. And so always the distance between death and policy is maintained, and between responsibility and consequence.
Kafka was best as capturing this sort of intransigence, and at describing just how violent a seemingly benevolent administration could be. To say the ANC has created a Kafkaesque world is perfectly apposite. The only difference between reading The Trial or The Castle, and living in SA is that the ANC is as much a victim of its own illogical labyrinth as you are.
It is without introspection. For self-appraisal would lead, inevitably, to guilt. And there is no crime, the ANC will be the first to tell you that. Without a crime, there can be no suspect. And without a suspect, there can be no agency. We don’t have “the powers that be”; we have “the powers who cannot be”. Not that it makes the world we inhabit any less savage.
Words were once a great weapon. Wielded properly, they could cut through political rhetoric and reveal the beast that lurks beneath. But the ANC has destroyed the meaning of words. You cannot hurt the ANC, you cannot wound its members, by describing the horror for which it is responsible. It has done that through sheer scale. Describing one agonising death should be enough to make the heart skip a beat. You can describe a 100 deaths to the ANC, it’s response will be to require you fill out a form — one it does not understand, and cannot process, if available at all.
We are good at filling out forms. Complying with the ANC’s bureaucracy is how we grieve. So we have all the numbers. We can tell you how many people died. No problem. But how many people the ANC killed, we cannot. The ANC has no form for that. And no-one dares produce one.
Time will help on this front. History produces more truth than contemporary debate ever will. Even today we are still discovering just how many people Stalin and Mao destroyed. There is going to be much to say about the ANC’s killing fields in 50 years’ time.
Police minister Bheki Cele says: “On average, 57 people are murdered a day, which brings us close to a war zone ... yet we are not at war.” If it’s not a war, however, what is it? Does it even have a name? No-one seems to want to give it one, least of all the ANC. You feel it needs one though, if we are going to be honest. The problem is, once you define your terms, you define much else besides, least of all both sides of the conflict.
The day we are brave enough to quantify the number of people the ANC has killed will be a great awakening. It will mean death matters again, and represent the end of the fatalism that causes us all to endlessly tolerate a violent administration that kills and maims in slow motion. When death matters, life matters. The ANC will never come to that conclusion; only the people can.
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