TOM EATON: The ANC will eat and eat and eat until there’s nothing left to eat

There’s something reassuringly old-fashioned about sentient paperweight and alleged parliamentary speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula allowing R1.5m of our money to be spent on two new luxury BMWs for her office.        

I mean yes, it’s outrageous and wasteful and tone-deaf and all those other angry words we’ve yelled at the ANC for decades, and which have rolled off it like duck fat down a chin.

But as the ANC flops around in its death throes, and we all roll unstoppably into the future, I can’t help feeling a twinge of warped nostalgia, the sort you might feel if you glimpsed a long-forgotten nemesis in a foreign city and found yourself gripped by the urge to run up to them, pinch their cheek and say: “I know this little face! Those stupid little eyes! That petulant little mouth! Yes, I know this little face!”

Of course, I’m exaggerating slightly. It is impossible to forget the face of Jacob Zuma’s ANC: its unemployment queues, broken municipalities and torn-up railway lines are a daily reminder. Still, in the past few years Cyril Ramaphosa has slightly airbrushed that picture of collapse. Admittedly, it didn’t take much: all he had to do to make the ANC look more sophisticated was stop condemning “clever blacks”, welcoming war criminals to the country and insisting that Jesus supports the ANC.

But now Mapisa-Nqakula has peeled off that veneer and reclaimed the proudest traditions of Zuma’s ANC, revealing the old machine, as loud and crude and downright impressive as an antique tractor grinding up the turf and stinking up the air at an agricultural show. 

Even her choice of car spoke to values grounded firmly and reassuringly in the 1990s. Not for her the nouveau riche Range Rover, gaudy plaything of the faux landed gentry. No, Mapisa-Nqakula’s cars would be made in the land of Marx and Engels, bolted together by cheerful social democrats (or at least people who’d once met one), and equipped with the seat-warmers of international solidarity and the mahogany dashboard of social justice.

I know this sounds sarcastic, but I genuinely can’t muster much outrage about Mapisa-Nqakula. At this point getting angry about ANC officials blowing your cash is like getting angry that a turnip hasn’t done your maths homework. If you were genuinely expecting a different outcome, I’m afraid the fault lies as much with you as it does with the turnip or Mapisa-Nqakula.

Certainly, by this late stage we know exactly what Mapisa-Nqakula is capable of. This, after all, is the person who as minister of defence shrugged as the SA National Defence Force spent R200m on importing iffish Covid drugs from Cuba, and then said she hadn’t known they weren’t registered and were therefore unusable in SA.

As the country recoiled from last year’s violence in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng she was back in the headlines, still not knowing things, insisting that what we had seen had been “counterrevolution” rather than an insurrection. This, of course, implies that Mapisa-Nqakula didn’t know that she was minister of defence: if she believes that challenges to ANC control are counterrevolutionary the party must, by definition, be engaged in revolution, which means by definition that it doesn’t have control of the state, least of all its military. How confusing and upsetting it must have been for Mapisa-Nqakula to be paid R200,000 every month for heading the very armed forces she was trying to overthrow.

Mercifully, her torment ended when she was fired, but she remains engaged in matters military and geopolitical: most recently, Mapisa-Nqakula has been part of something called an “inter-parliamentary union task force” which is trying to end Russia’s imperial war in Ukraine, or as the ANC no doubt describes it, Russia’s heroic pre-emptive defence of its future western border against the Nato-funded Nazi insurgents formerly known as Ukrainian citizens.

Surprisingly, despite Mapisa-Nqakula’s involvement in this process the war continues. And yet there are other, smaller victories she can claim. Certainly by not vetoing the purchase of those two swanky Beemers she has rolled back the years and done us the favour of reminding us, with crisp, bracing contempt, of why the ANC needs to be voted out of power as soon as humanly possible.

She has confirmed, beyond all doubts, that the party cannot be renewed or rehabilitated; that it will eat and eat and eat until there is nothing left to eat, and then it will look around at the wasteland and blame foreigners or the West for taking away all its things.

It’s possible that there were transport budgets that needed to be spent, and that the purchase of the two cars was all above board and generally unremarkable. In the bulging ledger of ANC theft and waste, R1.5m is also almost nothing – a few hours of interest on the billions sitting in the bank accounts of cadres who made their pile in the golden years of state capture.

And yet how unsophisticated one must be, how dull-witted and short-sighted and arrogant, to see the roof of our parliament, where a great charred hole still gapes at the sky, a monument to the wreckers, and still think it is a good idea to put a shiny Bavarian sunroof over the speaker of that ruined, abandoned and endlessly insulted parliament.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.