As the ANC Youth League coos and gurgles from the baby seat as it’s driven through Donbas to rubber-stamp Vladimir Putin’s sham referendums, and a growing number of South Africans start to wonder if autocracy might be a better option than democracy, we seem suddenly to be awash in the politics of small, crude Big Men.
I suppose this shouldn’t surprise anyone. We have precious little experience of democracy in this country, and even less of the sort of messy, noisy activism required to keep it healthy. Yes, we vote every five years, and we talk a great game about freedom and George Orwell (who apparently wrote a book in 1984 called Sheeple Farm, featuring a naughty pig, unless I’m thinking about Babe?), but scratch the surface and you’ll often find a yearning to regress to the eternal infancy offered by autocracy, where an infallible parent relieves you of the burden of having to have your own thoughts or be responsible for your own actions.
Certainly, last week’s news, that a new survey has found that a quarter of us would be willing to give up the vote if a benevolent dictator could sort out our current mess, wasn’t really news at all. Just last month, for example, we saw a perfect example of how this kind of thing happens, as Central Karoo hustler Gayton McKenzie said he would turn off the oxygen of a foreign patient and allow them to die if it meant that an SA patient could live.
His admirers roared their approval in below-the-line comments on news sites, and liberal pundits shuddered at the violence and crudeness of McKenzie’s nativist populism. Inevitably, the moment passed in uproar. Which is a pity, because I think it was worth examining his words and reflecting on how autocratic tendencies creep into a society disguised as pragmatism.
The first and most essential foundation for that creep is, of course, fear; injected into public life like a poisonous gas. To desperate or xenophobic South Africans, McKenzie’s promise to let foreigners die sounded like a plan of action, but what he was really doing was conjuring a nightmare: a future in which SA hospitals are so badly equipped that the presence of two patients requires one of them to die, and so evilly run that this decision is made using criteria that have nothing to do with anyone’s medical condition.
What McKenzie was promising, in other words, was a failed state, and what he was saying, between those glib, toxic lines, was what despots have been saying for millennia: “Chaos is coming, and I am the only thing that can save you from it.”
Of course, you could argue that chaos is already here. Certainly, it seems to have overwhelmed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s communications team, who meant to post his weekly newsletter on Monday but accidentally switched it with something clearly written in 2015, all about how load-shedding was frustrating but that he and his team were working on a plan that would soon blah blah blah. At least I hope that’s what happened, because if he expects anyone to believe his 2015 schtick in 2022 he’s further gone than we thought.
Speaking of things that are gone brings me elegantly to the ANC’s moral authority, the very last strands of which are currently trickling out of the slack, open mouths of a group of ANC Youth League (ANCYL) apparatchiks and onto the plastic upholstery of the Lada transporting them to the next stop of their Potemkin tour of occupied Ukraine.
According to reports in Russian state media, spotted by the Daily Maverick’s Peter Fabricius, our brave youngsters are there to do what Thabo Mbeki did in Zimbabwe, namely confirm that the will of the people has prevailed, thanks to sudden bursts of democratic zeal brought on, in some cases, by the inspiring presence of armed troops in balaclavas.
The news that the ANC is officially endorsing the results of sham independence referendums was extremely exciting to those in the Western Cape who want the province to leave SA and join the late 1890s. Indeed, one Khulekani Mondli Skhosana seemed to be setting a fairly concrete precedent when he told Russian media: “People should have the right to self-determination. They have the right to vote. This applies not only to the regions in which we are located, but to the whole world. We support legitimate elections and condemn any attempt to sabotage such democratic processes.”
Unfortunately for the Cape secessionists, however, the rapid disintegration of the ANC has given it the perfect out: it can simply say that this isn’t a formal ANCYL delegation officially representing the mother party. According to Fabricius, many of the useful idiots currently wandering around Donbas were parachuted into the youth league by Ace Magashule, which means they might not even qualify as a rent-a-crowd. After all, you have to pay for those, whereas anyone who works for Magashule probably had to accept an IOU, to be paid when Ramaphosa, the step-aside rule and the rule of law eventually go away.
Still, at least the ANC is standing by its friends. If only we — and democracy, and electricity — were also its friend. Because then we wouldn’t have to think about a future in which we fight it out for Gayton McKenzie’s solitary oxygen mask.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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