For years, the state of the nation address was dull. But then President Cyril Ramaphosa promised us smart cities and bullet trains, and now all bets are off: this week we could be offered anything from cold fusion to a 24-hour TV channel where you can watch Fikile Mbalula lying on his office floor, gently beating his forehead with his fists as he tries to have a thought.
Of course, before Ramaphosa reveals Mbaks-O-Vision he will no doubt give us an overview of the past 30 years. There will be much talk of the dawn of freedom, the challenges faced by the ANC in 1994, and the real and very dramatic progress made by the party in the 1990s.
As he reaches the 21st century though, Ramaphosa will start sounding like a diehard fan explaining the Jaws films to you. One? So great. Two? Well, it’s a tough act to follow, isn’t it? Three? Obviously not ideal — especially the scene in the firepool — but, in its defence, it made Two look pretty good.
Four? OK, yes, the effects were terrible and everyone was obviously just in it for the money and all of us were begging for it to end, but, say what you like, at least they called it a day and didn’t try to make a fifth one, and that’s got to count for something, right?
Speaking of rickety boats going down by the stern and bloodied people screaming and thrashing, the National Health Insurance scheme will almost certainly get some airtime on Thursday evening too. Of course, it goes without saying that high-quality, socialised healthcare is an ideal this country should strive for, and many supporters of the scheme insist that it may turn us into a kind of Cuba, exporting doctors to all parts of the world. Granted, our doctors won’t come back, but you can see the overlap.
Yes, Ramaphosa will say all sorts of things, some of which might even be true. But for me, the state of the nation is most succinctly described by three things he won’t say. The first is that he’ll be doing his speech in Cape Town’s city hall, because someone burnt down a large chunk of parliament two years ago, because Ramaphosa’s state doesn’t know how policing works.
Morse code
The second is that his party is frantically trying to get former president Thabo Mbeki to campaign for it because, according to polls, Mbeki remains South Africans’ favourite politician. Yes, the man who chose to let 300,000 South Africans die of HIV/Aids rather than have his intellectual vanity exposed by actual experts is still our most respected and admired politician.
According to the Sunday Times, the governing party has sent Mbeki an “SOS”, a reference to the old maritime distress code, widely believed to stand for “save our souls”. This, I recently discovered, is not true: the famous Morse code was chosen not for its meaning but for the simplicity and clarity of the signal. SOS, like the ANC, doesn’t actually stand for anything.
Still, the point remains that the ANC is hoping Mbeki will unleash some of that old pipe-smoking, beard-stroking razzle-dazzle and remind us why even his critics have to admit he was arguably one of the five presidents this country has had since 1994.
But getting Mbeki emotionally invested in the coming election will be difficult. And who can blame him? It’s one thing when Robert Mugabe asks you to steal an election for him and you can get the boot into Tony Blair and the neolibs, but those glory days are, like Zimbabwe’s economy, gone. Besides, Mbeki has made it clear he thinks the ANC is full of crooks and charlatans, or at least the sorts of crooks and charlatans you can’t rely on to rubber-stamp arms deals or develop dodgy Aids drugs such as Virodene.
Setting fires
Yes, ours is a nation in which our floundering life coach of a president has to deliver his motivational speech in the neighbour’s lounge because he left the stove on in his house and it burnt down. It’s a country in which the moral and intellectual bar is set so low that a disgraced, disgraceful figure such as Mbeki can cosplay statesmanship. Which is why, paradoxically, it might also be a nation in which the ANC crawls to one more victory in this year’s election.
I know how that sounds. How could the ANC win when it runs a country in which people can wander through the actual corridors of state power for hour after hour, unobserved and unmolested by the law, setting their little fires at their leisure? How could it win when its entire leadership cohort is so wretched that it makes a lethally callous pseudointellectual hawking garlic and beetroot look like a philosopher king?
Well, that’s how. The ANC might win because it has accustomed us to such relentlessly low expectations, such endlessly stifled hopes, such monumental frustration, that tens of millions of young South Africans who have never known anything else now believe this is what electoral politics in a constitutional democracy looks like, and are making it clear that they want nothing to do with it.
The young people are not going to vote. The rest are going to vote for more or less the same lot as last time. So what’s the state of the nation? All bets are off.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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