Some things are inevitable. The sun will rise in the east. Cyril Ramaphosa will reiterate that he’s going to visit Marikana any day now, just as soon as someone invents roads and internal combustion engines. Jacob Zuma will be released on medical parole.
These are fundamental laws of physics. But what do we make of the ANC’s urgent attempt to self-destruct by almost failing to contest great swathes of the country in October’s election?
Of course, the ANC has been failing in most respects for many years. If this was another looting scandal, or another generation of children betrayed, or another community left to rot, it would hardly be newsworthy.
We’ve known for over a decade that the ANC regards governance as window dressing, a tedious ritual it has to pretend to perform to continue doing its real job, namely making its politburo extremely rich. In this respect it is almost identical to, say, a small drug cartel operating out of the back room of a gloomy little strip club, selling the odd despondent lap dance and watered-down cocktail to create a threadbare illusion of legitimate business.
I can imagine a weekend in which the drug dealers are so busy breaking kneecaps that they forget to order the booze or draw up the dancers’ schedule. But forgetting to sell drugs? It’s absurd.
And yet here we are, or at least here we were, until the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) swooped in on Monday like a long-suffering nanny to pull the ANC’s sticky little fingers out of the plug sockets and wipe some of its poop off the walls.
So what are we to think when a predatory organism, its existence dedicated to nothing but its own self-interest and preservation, suddenly forgets to breathe and has to get urgent mouth-to-mouth from the IEC?
Was this supreme incompetence? Sabotage? Or was this simply what happens when a party has grown so accustomed to having cream ladled down its throat that it forgets that milk comes from cows and fails to send someone to milk us?
Certainly, given what we know about the ANC, systemic, slack-jawed helplessness seems the most likely explanation. Running a country is difficult at the best of times, but when you’re trying to do it with people employed for their loyalty rather than their talent, while also trying to remember which lies you’ve told to whom, and who’s trying to poison you, how much you’ve bribed them to hold off on the poisoning until the next elective conference, well, things can slide off the bottom of your to-do list easily.
Some have hinted at the more sinister option of sabotage, with Jessie Duarte implying that “individuals” had been identified and would, I assume, be Diko’d, a new form of punishment perfected by Ramaphosa whereby tainted cadres are banished from their office to the office next door.
According to this theory, the sabotage of the election would “embarrass” Ramaphosa and his faction, and get the ball rolling on a recall, a silly idea indeed since nobody in the ANC is embarrassed by anything, not even being in the ANC.
The darker implications of sabotage, however, are a different matter. The IEC’s last-minute intervention would have been deeply disappointing for opposition parties who had dared to dream of walking into coalition governments essentially unopposed.
Likewise, many residents of ANC-tormented wards would have started allowing themselves to wonder what it might be like to walk into their local municipality’s offices and see competent bureaucrats hard at work rather than a wasteland of cadres all frozen solid in a sort of spiritual Soviet permafrost, their glazed eyes staring at screens declaring that the system will be down until November 2045 but if you like you can leave your name and a contact number in the bin by the door.
I understand their disappointment. But I must confess that I am also relieved that, at least at the time of writing, the ANC was going to be allowed to register candidates wherever it wants. I’m relieved because July showed us what happens when the more pragmatic elements of the ANC don’t get their way.
At best, democracy in SA would face a full-frontal assault, with even mild-mannered ANC branches no doubt declaring the election illegitimate and calling for boycotts. At worst, well, if jailing Zuma for three weeks could cause R50bn in damage, just imagine what would happen if hundreds of tiny Zumas and their two-bit extraction schemes faced dissolution.
I understand the danger of making this argument. The threat of violence to sway political outcomes is called terrorism. But any party that is too hollowed out or self-sabotaging or simply incompetent to contest an election is well on the way to death. The question that remains is whether that death is peaceful, or whether it is a ghastly and grotesque ordeal full of horrible paroxysms and upheavals.
No, if it is allowable inside the law, then let the ANC rush candidates into every ward, and let its next step towards the grave and our collective salvation be unimpeachably free and fair, so that when it finally falls headlong into the earth it takes its stench, its contempt and its malice with it, and leaves the rest of us to begin to try to rebuild everything it touched.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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