Monday’s decision that Jacob Zuma cannot stand as an MP has come as a relief to many South Africans but most of all to Zuma himself, who, at the age of 82, faced the grim prospect of having to change out of his pyjamas and clock in at an office for the first time since he worked for the Guptas.
Not that age is necessarily an impediment to political ambition, of course. Even now, 77-year-old Donald Trump and 81-year-old Joe Biden are reminding us what the human body can do when it is highly motivated: sway slightly from left to right.
And why wouldn’t they sway harder and further than they’ve swayed in years when the prize is so huge? For Trump, the presidency means a steaming photocopier churning out pardons for him and all the friends he’s rented. For Biden, it means a squad of secret service agents to hold him upright and a press pool to explain to the world that he’s much better than he looks, sounds and is. These are serious incentives.
For Zuma, however, a return to parliament would be a miserable step back. After all, when you’ve delighted in urinating all over a public library, the last thing you want is to be sentenced to five years of community service mopping the floors of that library.
On the one hand, I want to suggest that Zuma will not be taking this lying down, by which I mean he will continue lying down while he lets his younger, more vigorous supporters not take this lying down.
Then again, I’ve also been struck by the strange lack of energy around this election, even from those who, like Zuma, are offering to end electoral politics in favour of something more robustly old world.
Perhaps we’re just quietly making peace with another ANC government. Perhaps, like Zuma or the promises of the ANC, we’re just getting old.
The Sunday Times reported at the weekend that less than half the 20-somethings are registered to vote, while that figure plunges to less than a fifth among 18- and 19-year-olds. Young people have checked out of SA democracy faster than your teenager leaving your car, taking with them not only the hope of dramatic change but any whiff of youthful exuberance.
Certainly, that generational shift will be feeling like a kind of demographic vice for some parties, crushing their hopes both from the younger end of the spectrum, where new voters aren’t showing up, and the older, where stalwarts are starting to die. Almost 3-million South Africans have died since the last general election. More than 2-million of those were older than 40. In other words, it’s probable that many hundreds of thousands of voters have gone without being replaced.
Yes, there are many reasons why this election feels so knackered, but you know the energy is low when even some journalists seem to have given up, abandoning any attempt to interrogate politicians in favour of being human public address systems.
Indeed, when Hlaudi Motsoeneng told one newspaper at the weekend that he “can mesmerise anyone”, I had to admit that he’d certainly mesmerised at least one journalist.
Then again, perhaps the idea is simply to sit back and allow these hustlers to tell us exactly who they are. That seems to have been the idea behind another so-called interview, this time with the Patriotic Alliance’s Gayton McKenzie, who, after giving an account of his criminal youth straight out of a Victorian penny dreadful, expressed the belief that he was the only politician capable of tackling organised crime because he’d once been a gangster.
It was certainly an interesting idea, or if “idea” is too generous a word then at least an interesting cranial emission, this notion that you are only qualified to do a job if you’ve worked in that field in the past. Alas, the interviewer didn’t ask if the reverse applied — that only someone who had been an MP or president could be considered for either job — but then I suppose that would have taken up time from asking things like “Is there anything else you want to say?” and “Is this microphone close enough to your mouth?”
The greatest disappointment of the past few days, however, has been Mmusi Maimane, who has just published his new book, The Audacity of Hope, no, wait, sorry, Dare To Believe.
To be clear, launching a book days before an election is an excellent strategy because it makes you look very impressive. That’s because writing a book like this is hard: not only do you have to find four hours to talk into your ghost writer’s intern’s Dictaphone, but you also need to pose for the picture on the cover.
Best of all, however, an extract from a new book is question-proof. It’s a perfect opportunity to go full Obama-Lite with your Yes We Can shtick and to pump up your congregation with some righteous vibes.
And yet, with major media houses eager to publish long extracts, the two headlines that came out of it were “The DA would have ultimately destroyed my soul” and “Why I Could Not Stay in the DA”.
Imagine spending all those five or six hours writing your book just to tell everybody that the DA made you feel sad.
And he doesn’t even have the excuse of being 82.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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