Ordinarily, the stuff exuded by the ANC government’s spokespeople is best avoided lest it leave a lasting stain. Certainly, our media flatters them terribly by referring to them now and then as “spin-doctors”, as if that long, grey line of gaslighters has any proficiency beyond dangling like windsocks in the prevailing dogma.
It’s also not as if there’s a shortage of other material this week, what with the president creating a minister of electricity, no doubt to be followed soon by a minister of electricity for realsies, and then a minister of no seriously guys I’m not even joking anymore we’re totally going to make electricity happen by 2030.
There was also the story of the president’s plane being towed for minor repairs into a hangar at Cape Town International, apparently by the same people who buy trains for Prasa; according to reports, technicians “miscalculated” the height of the aircraft’s tail and promptly banged it straight into some steel roof beams. The jet, like the country it represents, is now going nowhere until it is fixed.
Yes, the fruit has hung particularly low for columnists over the last few days; and yet sometimes we must put aside childish things and instead turn to the tawdry little sideshow where, on Sunday, government spokesperson Vincent Magwenya was trying to tell us that a steaming heap of bull was, in fact, a glittering pile of bullion.
Of course, nobody expects him to sound plausible, but I can’t help feeling that he might have worked on his script a little better, perhaps paraphrasing the bit where he insisted that Cyril Ramaphosa “is applying his mind” to the electricity crisis.
After all, it was way back in 2014 when Jacob Zuma appointed Ramaphosa to fix Eskom, so either he’s been applying his mind since and proving that the application of said mind produces no results whatsoever, or he’s only started doing it now, thereby confirming that he’s spent his presidency hoping that this load-shedding the commoners are talking about is a natural phenomenon, like the northern lights or El Nino, and will soon fade away so the mob’s distant yells can be replaced by the gentle lowing of his cattle and the contented bleats of Fikile Mbalula.
Perhaps realising what he’d implied about the president, Magwenya threw himself into the safety of the collective, explaining that Ramaphosa was consulting with “business, labour community leaders, interfaith leaders and the presidential co-ordinating council”. Of course, some radical atheists might wonder why the president is consulting interfaith leaders rather than, say, energy experts, but I suppose the first chapter of Genesis doesn’t say, “And then a qualified engineer said: ‘Let there be light’”, so perhaps we’ll call that one a draw.
Indeed, Magwenya’s words to the nation were full of reconciliation and the turning of other cheeks. This, he insisted, is “not the time for finger-pointing”. Instead, he said, we should “look past our ideological differences and … work together in the interests of our nation”.
I can’t fault him on the first observation: pointing a finger at the ANC is always a bad idea since it endangers whatever jewellery you might be wearing on that finger.
Magwenya’s second request, however, was about as sensible as a surgeon asking his team to look past the axe lodged in their patient’s skull. After all, it is the ANC’s ideology — rent-seeking masquerading as pro-poor revolution — that got us to this point. To ask that we overlook it would be insulting if it wasn’t so transparent.
Perhaps realising that he was losing the room, Magwenya tried some classic early 19th-century oratory. “The president expects”, he began, as if relaying a message to the fleet from Admiral Nelson, if Nelson had shot off his own arm and then accidentally set his flagship on fire by knocking over his lantern while reading Captaining for Dummies in his bunk.
“The president expects that even those who harbour reservations about his approach will join in and put shoulder to the wheel because we are working towards the same goal.”
Yes, there was a lot of other silliness a columnist could have written about this week; but that sentence stood up and hit me, even with all its clichés and the libellous claim that you and I share the same goal as the ANC, as if you and I would knowingly consign millions of people to ruin if it kept us in whiskey and braai packs for another year or two.
It hit me because I want to put my shoulder to the wheel, and I know I’m not alone. I know there is a great yearning to rebuild this country, a vast reservoir of goodwill and energy and idealism locked away under a protective dome of pessimism and cynicism, waiting until the signs are clear that it is time to roll back the dome and open the sluices; to plant; to unclench and unfurl.
I know I and millions like me want to put our shoulder to the wheel. But where the wheel should be there is only a saucer-sized disk of cardboard, procured for R5m by a catering and logistics company that was founded yesterday; and our shoulders are doing other things right now, like having Voltaren rubbed into them to ease the tension headaches.
Ah well. Back under the dome, I suppose.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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