Jacob Zuma has a tough task ahead of him, even tougher than swearing to uphold the constitution while keeping a straight face. To avoid the ultimate horror — living off just his pension — he needs to sell SA the last thing many of its people want: chaotic, arbitrary rule by decree.
To be fair, if anyone can do it, it’s him and his MK party, a group that is proving adept at mashing together contradictory positions and selling them as common sense.
For example, just last week MK chief whip Sihle Ngubane reiterated the party’s official position that May’s election was “stolen”. What this means, of course, is that MK believes the current parliament is not only illegitimate but possibly criminal. As such, the party must also surely believe that anyone who sits in said parliament is at best a sell-out, like those who sat in and legitimised apartheid’s tricameral parliament, or at worst an accomplice to a crime against democracy in this country.
And yet there they sit, MK’s MPs. How? Is this absurdly transparent hypocrisy or some form of revolutionary self-sacrifice; a kind of martyrdom in which MK MPs delve deep and find the forbearance to receive and cash all those dirty, dirty salary cheques?
I don’t know, but then I don’t live in the bubble of cognitive dissonance that between MK and the EFF has branded itself the “Progressive Caucus”.
Before I sound too critical, I must say I think this is a pretty good name, and not only because “caucus” makes you think of people having meetings, which makes you think someone might do something at some point.
Progressivism is a good thing, and a broad church too, perhaps even broad enough to include both the EFF and MK’s version of social reform, whether that be attacking a Clicks store every so often or, in the case of MK, offering a return to festive feudalism.
Not that either needs to justify its claim of progressivism, of course. When you operate in a set-up in which, to quote revolutionary Hamlet, there is nothing either good or bad but Big Daddy wills it so, literally anything can make sense. After all, this is a world in which you can be a senior member of one party even as you lead another.
No wonder there was a faint tone of real surprise on Sunday when Zuma was expelled from the ANC. Most of the noise we’ll be hearing this week will be performative victimhood, but for someone so used to having reality bent to his appetites there must have been a real sting, however small.
At least Zuma is now free to throw himself into the work of trying to discredit and then dismantle SA democracy. Already claims of a stolen election have been quietly escalated by a certain sympathetic media house (think Tembisa decuplets) to claims of a “soft coup” by colonial powers. (They didn’t name the colonists, but given that Ramaphosa has done more to sever ties with the US than any post-apartheid president, I’m assuming it’s not the Yanks.)
The trouble with the coup narrative though, is that in the grand tradition of all megalomaniacal social engineers it ignores what people actually want; and as we learnt from an election deemed free and fair, what almost three-quarters of SA voters actually want is anything but the Progressive Caucus.
For decades the official opposition said one thing, over and over again: the country is a mess because the ANC is doing a bad job.
Zuma’s shills can kvetch, but if they genuinely believe the will of just more than a quarter of voters should trump the will of the rest, I’m afraid they’ve got far more in common with Victorian colonialists and Hendrik Verwoerd than they might like to imagine.
However, this is the sort of rabbit hole Zuma and his followers have been driven down by one unexpected opponent: the DA.
For decades the official opposition said one thing, over and over again: the country is a mess because the ANC is doing a bad job. Without any real prospect of the ANC losing an election, that message slowly took on a subtle but persistent subtext: if the ANC did a better job, the country would be a better place.
Combined with a growing nostalgia for the Mandela era I suspect that subtext took hold as an uninterrogated, unconscious but widespread belief: that the best and most appropriate form of government for this country is that provided (at least in theory) by a clean, high-functioning ANC.
Perhaps that’s why so many DA voters seem happy to work with the ANC now: they believe their party is the medicine the ANC needs to become that high-functioning version of itself, especially now that it has sloughed off its more regressive elements into the opposition benches.
In short, the ANC and DA have found genuine common cause on common ground, and that leaves Zuma and the MK party with only one option: find a completely different cause on a totally different patch of ground, and try to get everyone to move there, no matter how unappealing it seems.
If the GNU is offering cautious, incremental improvement through co-operation, it must offer chaos and unilateralism. If the GNU is offering constitutional democracy, it must offer autocracy.
It’s a hard, hard sell, and even the smallest successes by the GNU will make it harder. Still, Zuma knows the stakes. And pensions only go so far ...
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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