At the weekend, as I watched Jacob Zuma wishing Julius Malema a happy birthday and exhorting his protégé to help him wreck the lives of all South Africans “whether they like it or not”, it was hard not to think of the soap operas I used to vegetate in front of as a student.
Before you think this column is going to get very silly, I should quickly point out that there aren’t a lot of parallels between SA politics and, say, Days Of Our Lives. When I watched Days in the late 1990s (or “Dool”, as we aficionados called it) it was packed with satanic possession, mind control, alien siblings, island lairs, secret identical twins and a girl who lived in a swamp who was an opera singer.
In other words, Dool was much more grounded in reality than what Zuma, Malema or even the ANC are promising. Indeed, as Zuma urged Malema to help him reach a two-thirds majority in May “to change the country whether they like it or not”, and “sort out things thereafter”, I was reminded that just the other day we had a president who couldn’t do arithmetic, and wondered which poor courtier was going to draw the short straw to explain to him that the EFF’s possible 15% plus his possible 5% don’t add up to 66%.
In one respect though, the parallels are surprisingly close: no matter how high the cliff from which the villain plunges, or how spectacular the volcano that blows up his island, or how many democratic institutions he helped collapse, the Machiavellian rogue somehow comes back. And he comes back for one simple reason: people love him.
Not all the people, of course: as Abraham Lincoln reminds us, you can’t fool all of them all of the time, and it goes without saying that there are millions and millions of South Africans who can’t stomach a single minute of either a soap opera or Jacob Zuma.
I’m also not suggesting Zuma’s return isn’t soaked in cynicism. The only grass roots he cares about are the ones on his favourite putting green. But the fact remains that Zuma is loved by many people in this country. I don’t know the extent to which the ANC’s dramatic decline in the 2019 general election was because it was the first without Zuma as president since 2009, but it seems more than coincidental that the biggest fall in ANC support was in KwaZulu-Natal, followed closely by the Free State, the former stronghold of Ace Magashule.
No, I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that there are hundreds of thousands of South Africans who want to see Zuma at least back in parliament. And because they want him, they are willing to do what I and rest of the soap opera audience used to do every time some villain returned from the grave: ignore the absurdity of the explanation for his resurrection and, far more importantly, forget everything he did last time around so that he can do it all again.
Of course, Zuma won’t have forgotten anything, which brings us to another parallel between the populists now riding high around the world and the great antagonists of daytime television, namely what drives them. Populism is a broad church, but many of its stars seem driven by just two motives; the same two, it turns out, that drive the great soapy villains: staying out of jail and exacting revenge on the holier-than-though townsfolk who have so vilified them.
Of course, Zuma is a master of the politics of grievance, having managed to play the victim expertly for years: as recently as Sunday when Iqbal Survé’s Independent Online ran a hit piece on journalist Karyn Maughan (who Zuma infamously tried and failed to sue) comparing her to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
It was entirely transparent, but to the sort of people who want to see Zuma not just restored to power but relieved of the tiresome restrictions of a constitutional democracy, it was deeply satisfying. Not that any of it was true, of course, but it didn’t have to be true to be effective. In the kindergarten sandpit politics of Maga-style populism, simply owning the Libs is a win in itself: no sooner had I criticised the piece on X than a couple of useful idiots told me that if the piece had angered me — a white “presstitute” possibly in the pay of Mossad (I kid you not) — then it had done its job.
Yes, when Zuma recorded his message to Malema and fantasised about changing the constitution, he would have been imagining fleeting, half-formed delights, like the Guptas finally unblocking him on WhatsApp, or Mzwanele Manyi coming back from the EFF so he didn’t have to use that godawful fake tiger fur footstool any more. But when he said “whether they like it or not” he knew exactly who “they” are; and when he promised to “sort out things thereafter”, he knew precisely which things need to get sorted out first.
Yes, Zuma might not know what happens when you add five to 15, but he understands in forensic detail the kind of government he wants to inflict on South Africans. Luckily, so do most of us. Volcano lairs and space twins are one thing, but the prospect of Giggling King Zuma back in charge? That’s just silly.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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