Sometimes a fire is just a fire. But when it burns on the same airbase where the Guptas landed nine years ago, and its smoke rises into a sky that has recently been filled with the charred remains of businesses and a parliament building, you’d be forgiven for imagining that you’re seeing the reeking legacy of Jacob Zuma rising up over Pretoria.
Even if it turns out to be little more than the result of a cadet tossing a non-standard-issue zol into the wrong vat of jet fuel, Sunday’s fire at Waterkloof Air Force Base remains a stark reminder of how far we’ve drifted as a country.
Nine years ago, as officials scrambled to put out another kind of fire, many of us treated the pantomime-like arrival of the Gupta wedding party — in retrospect, a supremely sinister moment — as a joke.
On Sunday, many immediately assumed that what might be an innocent accident was another attack on the state. It’s not just our naiveté that’s been stripped away by the blowtorch of the ANC’s insatiable lust. Our nerves, too, are scorched, and these days a fire is no longer just a fire.
On the other hand, these many years have also taught us a certain kind of caution. The Gupta landing was a seminal lesson in that education, teaching us that things are not always as they seem, and that what looks like an on-the-nose satire of a banana republic, replete with chintzy B-listers swanning past grovelling officials, might in fact represent a very unfunny, very literal, attack on state institutions by agents both domestic and foreign.
Perhaps it was this hard-learnt caution that made the initial reaction to the fire so careful and muted. Certainly, there were a few early responders, their tweeting fingers perhaps made twitchier by the last decade, who insisted the fire was the latest front of the insurrection. The rest, however, seemed content to accept — at least for now — that a fire had started and been put out, and that was all anyone knew.
Perhaps it was the speed of the military’s response that reassured us. And to be fair, if this was insurrection it was pretty lame. Anecdotal evidence suggests some aspects of the violence in July were planned with chilling thoroughness. The man in whose name the violence was committed was a supremely gifted saboteur himself: Jacob Zuma managed to demolish the SA Revenue Service, parts of the judiciary and great swathes of SA’s rail network without detonating a single stick of dynamite. Compared to these doyens of destruction, whoever started the Waterkloof fire was a rank amateur, and therefore not someone to take too seriously.
I’m sure the national mood was also helped by total silence from the presidency, which is preoccupied with smiling and nodding at our tourism minister as she mashes fish sticks into the nursery carpet and scribbles obscenities on the wall in a desperate bid to get fired.
As tourist campaigns go, it’s an odd one: “Come to sunny SA, before I help turn it into a failed state!” But it is now fairly clear that the only way Lindiwe Sisulu gets to continue living in the style to which she’s become accustomed is to get fired by Ramaphosa and then cash in those sweet, sweet martyr credits. Trouble is, she’s up against an opponent who was born for this kind of fight.
Ramaphosa is a Kung Fu master of doing nothing. He is immobility made flesh; a man who cannot only watch paint dry, but then stay to watch it fade, chip, and flutter to the floor. Not only is Ramaphosa ready to not fire Sisulu, he’s ready to not fire her over and over again for decades; for millennia; until the earth is a shrivelled, dead ball, and the only three humans left alive are him, Sisulu and Fikile Mbalula, who is pretty sure that things are about to pick up for the ANC.
Yes, Sisulu has picked the wrong statue to mess with. For the rest of us, however, Ramaphosa’s caution is increasingly difficult to distinguish from a kind of fugue state. At the weekend, for example, he told attendees at a party clambake that “divisions and factions in the ANC are becoming a threat to our democracy”. This suggests he has now adopted the psychological coping strategy of living in 2008.
While this has clear benefits — imagine how excited he’ll be when he sees that first goal at the 2010 World Cup — it does ask questions about his grasp of the complexities of 2022. To be fair, he is right about the dangers of “factions”: you only needed to own a business in KwaZulu-Natal in July to know that the greatest threat to SA democracy is the scorched-earth wing of the ANC.
But does Ramaphosa understand that the second-greatest threat is his own faction? And does he understand why? When he speaks about SA democracy being threatened in the near future, does he have any inkling of the damage he and his colleagues have already done to it? Does he understand, deep down, in a meaningful place, why half of eligible voters no longer participate in democracy? Does he know democracy is dying on his watch?
Waterkloof may have been an accident, but there is smoke everywhere. And where’s there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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