As Cyril Ramaphosa watched Sunday’s rally at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium disintegrate, and found himself being wrestled towards safety by his bodyguards like a designer suitcase being dragged down a flight of stairs behind a very grumpy porter, he would have tried to comfort himself with the fact that the same indignity befell Nelson Mandela 27 years ago.
On that occasion — a May Day rally in 1995 — things got so hairy that Mandela had to be bundled into an armoured car.
There are, however, some important differences between the two events, which would have depressed Ramaphosa as he gazed disconsolately into the darkness caused by lying face down on the back seat of his limo with his jacket over his head.
First, Mandela had gone to Umlazi as a nation builder, hoping to cement KwaZulu-Natal into his new republic, with the full backing of a united ANC and rock-solid tripartite alliance. Ramaphosa was in Phokeng as proof of life, smiling and waving in the hope that at least a few people in the stadium would remember that he’s president, as his disintegrating party begins its final throes.
Second, Mandela was fleeing the sound of gunfire, heard alarmingly nearby and possibly indicating the approach of IFP militia. Ramaphosa was running away from members of his own political alliance.
Finally, and most likely to make Ramaphosa sigh as he felt the weight of the bodyguards sitting on him like two muscular Forrest Gumps atop a particularly soft bus-stop bench, was the main difference between the two events: Mandela was Mandela, and Ramaphosa is, well, not.
Luckily, nobody in the ANC ever has to feel sad for long, thanks to the party’s crack team of sycophants, which descends like a cloud of butterflies to kiss and flutter around any bruise that might be forming on a senior ego.
Indeed, no sooner had Ramaphosa been whisked away from reality than Cosatu president Zingiswa Losi was telling Newzroom Afrika that angry mineworkers had been booing the Sibanye-Stillwater mining company, not the president.
To be fair, it’s possible she’s right. It’s also possible that to many mineworkers, Ramaphosa and the senior management of Sibanye-Stillwater are the same people.
Either way, Losi would have known that nobody ever got poor stroking the ANC’s extraordinarily thin skin and making sure the boo stays taboo.
In 2010, for example, Fikile Mbalula — then a mere deputy minister — warned attendees that booing would not be tolerated at the ANC’s 98th birthday celebration. Anyone who tried any funny business, he explained, would see the ANC “turn on them with the ferocity of a cornered bull”.
I must confess that the image of a terrified animal about to be stabbed to death doesn’t immediately make me think of dignified and disciplined leaders, but it clearly went down a treat at Nkandla: a few months later, Mbalula was a full-blown sports minister.
In 2013, likewise, when Jacob Zuma was booed at the FNB Stadium during Mandela’s memorial service, Lindiwe Zulu told the Mail & Guardian that the party was studying footage to identify the guilty. A year later, she became a cabinet minister.
In 2014, Mbalula was back, clearly having realised that he needed to up his fart-catching game if he was ever going to get a better portfolio. Luckily for him, Zuma had been booed during a football game, and Mbalula could tell the treasonous scoundrels that “all of their plans, infused with satanism at best, will never succeed in the future because their plans are nothing else but filled with evil”.
And just like that, satire was dead.
The bruise-kissing, however, lived on. After a weird flirtation with emotional maturity in 2017, when Patekile Holomisa said the booing of Zuma during a May Day rally was the sign of a healthy democracy, it was back to business as usual in 2021, when the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal accused the party in the Free State and Mpumalanga of busing in booers to heckle Zuma outside the high court in Pietermaritzburg — a rent-a-boo conspiracy.
This week, we’re back there yet again, as Losi assures Ramaphosa that he is loved and respected and that those upsetting boos were meant for someone else.
The difference this time, however, is that while Ramaphosa probably appreciates the pandering little lies, I’m not sure he believes them. Worse, I suspect he knows that this ritual — the almost formalised process whereby the ANC lies to itself about its own failings — is the reason he’s being evacuated from softball appearances with unions that should be eating out of his hand.
Ramaphosa knows, as do we all, that many parties contain people who describe legitimate protest as satanic, or who, in an Orwellian parody, study recordings to identify traitors. He knows that some of those parties might even allow those people to rise a little through the ranks.
But he must surely also know that when those buffoons and villains become cabinet ministers, immovably embedded because their lack of character makes them indispensable as rubber stumps, then you’re at that stage of the collapse where you’re going to have to keep the engine running even when addressing political allies.
In the end, perhaps Sunday’s debacle was a relief. After all, how exhilarating to be yanked around, even for two minutes, by big, strong, highly trained people, when you’ve been yanked around by small, weak, utterly useless people for so many years ...
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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