TOM EATON: Unapologetic, unfettered populism the story of this election

As I write this column, SA seems to be edging towards pragmatic centrism. Which means, given how well I’ve predicted the outcomes of the past week, today probably dawned with President-for-Life Gayton McKenzie congratulating the Empress Duduzile on ascending to the throne of the Democratic People’s Republic of KwaZuma-Natal.

I hope it didn’t. I hope the weekend’s rumours and analyses are proving accurate, and that cooler, more technocratic heads are prevailing; that our political class has seen that the most popular party in our country is supported by just 16% of voting-age adults and understood that it is time, to misquote Eliot, to shore up these fragments against our ruin.

Some fragments seem sturdier than others. In an election in which most established parties got fewer votes than in 2019, the IFP’s modest growth was a quietly spectacular achievement, especially given that it is based in a province swooning into the arms of Big Daddy Zuma. The DA, likewise, will rightly believe that its core is solid, despite some shuffles around its edges.

It is, however, the arrival of unapologetic, unfettered populism that is the story of this election, and no doubt the animating energy behind attempts to form a centrist coalition of people who, despite some fundamental difference about how the world should look, still believe in constitutional democracy.

Indeed, so dramatic is the reanimation of Zuma, and the mainstreaming of McKenzie’s hustle, that even the EFF has emerged from this election with a faintly musty aura of old-school respectability, like a slightly less arthritic version of the SA Communist Party; a place where serious people gather to have earnest conversations about ideology, until the vicar politely pops his head round the doorway and says he needs to lock up the hall and they’ll have to take this to the all-night café down the road.

Two months ago I wrote in this column that I welcomed the arrival of the MK party as an opportunity to hold a kind of referendum; to gauge, on a large scale, SA’s appetite for the anti-democratic feudalism that Zuma is selling. I urged him to fly his flag so we could see how many saluted. Today we know: enough to surprise people like me and to focus the minds of centrists, but perhaps not enough to present SA with a full-blown challenge to democratic norms.

It is tempting to believe that, with the support of only about 6% of voting-age adults, Zuma’s new party will go the same way as his ANC went, becoming hollowed out by factional scheming before it splits into smaller groups. But I must also admit I was tempted to believe that the ANC might scrape a majority in this election and that Zuma would be an also-ran. From now on, I’m afraid, the only people I’m trusting are the pollsters, whom I will be emailing later today to ask if they also do Lotto numbers.

It’s bewildering, but maybe that’s a natural response after a decade of grinding inevitability: being suddenly presented with the current range of circumstances and possibilities feels like coming unmoored from some muddy, grim but dependable anchorage.

In my defence, I sometimes struggle with stories that play games with the passage of time, and I had always assumed that if the ANC lost a general election it would be either in 2024 or 2029. Now it seems that the ANC lost this election somewhere between Nasrec in 2017 and the Estcourt Correctional Centre in July of 2021, and Wednesday was just finalising the paperwork.

It’s bewildering, but maybe that’s a natural response after a decade of grinding inevitability: being suddenly presented with the current range of circumstances and possibilities feels like coming unmoored from some muddy, grim but dependable anchorage.

Perhaps it was that bewilderment that overcame billionaire Rob Hersov, who, while inexplicably being interviewed by the national broadcaster over the weekend, suggested that what SA needed right now was an “independent president” like Mogoeng Mogoeng, who is a religious fanatic, or Gayton McKenzie, who is Gayton McKenzie.

It was outlandish, but was it much more outlandish than hearing that one possible future for our country is now being negotiated by teams led by Helen Zille and Fikile Mbalula?

I mean, I wish them all well, but you have to admit that those negotiations could end at any second, either because Zille has heard the distant cry of someone on X needing to be saved from wokeness or because Mbalula has been given something to read that doesn’t have pictures.

I’m joking, of course, because that’s what people do when they’re nervous as hell. I know that both Zille and Mbalula will put the country first and do their best, especially if they schedule talks after Mbalula has had his fish fingers and his nap.

At least, that’s what I hope; because the alternative is what might be about to happen in — and to — KwaZulu-Natal. The coin is still spinning, but it doesn’t seem irrational to suggest that the province has just become a substantially less safe to live, even without its traditional festivals involving the burning of trucks and malls.

If the gloomier analyses have it right, then a great many councils and even a few municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal are about to find themselves under the control of what is effectively the Zupta ANC of about 2014, but with none of the brakes imposed by having to be a consensus-seeking national government.

Yes, the coin is still spinning. Heads or tails? If only we could ask the pollsters again...

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.