Friday’s “Presidential Golf Day” in Bloemfontein, held as part of the ANC’s 111th birthday orgy, has been condemned as tone-deaf and dangerous. But in its defence, it was a pretty perfect metaphor: golf, after all, is a game in which wealthy people try very hard to be below average before ending up exactly where they started.
Some critics worried that the day’s pay-for-play format, whereby donors could secure a four-ball with Cyril Ramaphosa for a fee of R350,000, stank of potential impropriety.
Again, I would urge calm. R350,000 to Ramaphosa is about 14c to you and me, barely enough to secure a handshake and a selfie, and I doubt genuine power players would have been caught dead associating with that kind of pocket change.
No, I suspect the day was pitched squarely at political and mercantile poseurs, those hustlers who strut and preen in the hope, to quote Succession’s Tom Wambsgans, of “getting away from the endless middle and towards the bottom of the top”.
But not everyone was satisfied by golf or its inherent metaphors. For Dali Mpofu the relevant game was cricket, as he saw the 111 on the ANC’s marketing bumph and lunged for the most obvious analogy he could find.
“For those who understand CRICKET,” he tweeted, apparently leaning on his caps lock button, “the most difficult score to pass is 111. In cricket terminology 111 is called a Nelson. Upon reaching a Nelson even the best batsmen usually get tired, COLLAPSE and must go OUT.”
Of course, nothing in that final sentence is true: cricket’s Nelson, named after the one-legged British admiral, is a myth with no basis in statistical reality. SA batsmen have also recently reminded us that the most difficult score to pass is whichever one you’re on when Australians have finally warmed up their hamstrings and decided to concentrate.
Still, I don’t blame Mpofu for not knowing any of that: I doubt he has much time to watch cricket, what with being so busy losing court cases.
Besides, I would argue that both the spirit and authorship of Mpofu’s tweet are entirely apt: like cricket’s Nelson, the ANC is nothing but a myth that has clung on to become a tedious cliché, and, like Mpofu, the party’s leadership is paid large amounts of money to keep failing in public.
So no, I don’t have a problem with the golf day, or lame tweets about imaginary cricketing phenomena. I must admit that I’m slightly surprised by the former — given what the ANC has done to Bloemfontein, I’m genuinely amazed that they still have enough intact water pipes to keep a whole golf course green — but people must play their games and recycle their myths if it makes them feel good, because reality is accelerating towards us.
The watershed 2024 election has gone from being a vague date with some distant destiny to the much more real “next year”, a shift that will be terrifying to the ANC rank and file while sharply focusing the minds of those who own SA’s parallel economy of corruption and extraction.
Both know the ANC can’t become electable in the 600-odd days between now and the election. Both know Monday’s promise by Ramaphosa and deputy whatnot Paul Mashatile, that people who are “not performing” will be removed, was laughable.
Even if they break with tradition and actually do what they say, the party elite would spend 100 of those 600 days realising that firing incompetent cadres would leave only 18 ANC members employed in the public service; another 100 formulating a new definition of “not performing” based on loyalty, standing in the party and the quality of kompromat in their office safe; another 100 trying to get the national executive committee to read it; another 100 getting it rubber-stamped; another 50 choosing the first stooge to be sacrificed; five days doing the actual dismissal, finally kicking off two days of violent protests by labour unions, at which point the policy, and the country, would shut down.
No, 2023 will be a year of terrified paralysis in the ANC as its leaders count and recount the number of lifeboats and pore over ever-shifting lists of who’ll get a seat and who won’t.
For the owners of the shadow economy, however, it will be a year of clear-eyed pragmatism and action, because they know Ramaphosa needs to start putting people in prison, and that many of their fixers in government won’t be available to them after the election.
After all, corruption relies on relationships, and while some of them may be prepared to try to build new relationships with members of a coalition government, others may not be willing to take that risk and will instead choose to make the next 600 days count like never before.
The theft will become more audacious, the assassinations more common. Already this year we have read of the attempted killing of Fort Hare vice-chancellor Sakhela Buhlungu and an alleged attempt to poison Eskom’s Andre de Ruyter.
I can’t give any hopeful or even useful advice on combating the gangsters, but I do know a bit about cricket, and I know when someone is on 111 they’re tired but they’re not about to give up and wander off.
Instead, you dismiss them. You get them out. You remove them. If you don’t, you lose. It’s that simple.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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