National mottos tend to be variations on a small number of themes. You’ll find lots of mentions of God, and quite a bit about freedom, though Uruguay seems to have misunderstood the assignment — its motto, “Freedom or Death” presents its citizens with the paradox of being forced to choose freedom.
But perhaps the most common ideal among the nations is one that’s been featured on SA’s national crest, both the old and the new, for over a century: unity.
Not that past governments understood it, exactly. The apartheid state clearly thought “Ex unitate vires” meant “No more than an assegai-width between those wagons, boys!” But the persistence of the idea reveals its power. No matter their ideology, geography or even their era, politicians understand that unity is the bedrock on which all of their worldly endeavours are built.
Pity our current lot then, as they try to project unity and stability on a political landscape still heaving and splitting and belching fire after May’s comet impact of an election, with new blocs rising up out of the magma as others sink away.
To its credit, the largest of those blocs — President Cyril Ramaphosa’s new government — is doing a fairly good impression of unity, helped in no small part by some strong tailwinds. It has presided over a county in which the petrol price has only ever fallen and in which interest rates are about to fall for the first time in four years, while the return of reliable (albeit expensive) electricity has surely soothed the psyches of millions of South Africans.
Of course, some haven’t got the unity memo. Like John Steenhuisen, who apparently unaided by either the DA or a brainstem recently distinguished himself by hiring a B-grade alt-right internet provocateur as his chief of staff. A lot has been written about this fiasco, but before it disappears with a faintly sulphurous wheeze I would just like to say for the record that I don’t entirely agree with the view of my colleagues in the media that this person’s hasty purge of his X account reveals an attempt to hide his odious beliefs.
On the contrary, I think when a self-proclaimed champion of free speech deletes scores of tweets it’s surely proof that he doesn’t believe the things he says — indeed, that he believes almost nothing coherent and is merely a limp windsock twisting whichever way he thinks will win him the most friends, clicks and advertising revenue.
Of course, not all of his tweets fell below Steenhuisen’s minimum standard. You can still go to the official X account of the minister of agriculture’s chief of staff and read a post by a leading online publisher of white supremacist vitriol in the US, explaining that Satan has convinced women that they want education and careers when in fact what all women really want is to have a husband and babies.
To fix this Satanic problem, he continues, Christian nationalists should “seize control of the media and culture from our enemies. Pump the normies with pronatalist content ... and make motherhood our society’s most sacred and highest honour vocation for women”.
Again, I can’t tell you why this one survived the purge, but perhaps you can ask Steenhuisen next time he tells you he respects a free press or the choices of women. But this sort of thing is the exception in the new government rather than the rule. Indeed, the most acrimonious recent disagreement between Ramaphosa and Helen Zille has been over whether they’re part of a government of national unity, a coalition government or simply a temporary digs for people who’ve been thrown out on the street by their gatvol spouses.
Once the courtiers leave the palace and its etiquette, though, there are no allies. Ramaphosa’s fragile cabinet might smile for the cameras (or quietly sit in a corner reading tweets about how to turn normies into Stepford Wives) but down in the metros and municipalities the parties that comprise the GNU transform into hardened pragmatists, willing to shank each other for half a sniff at a mayoral seat, ideology and policy be damned. Unity is the name, in local government, of the paramedic on standby in case someone throws a chair across a council chamber.
Speaking of throwing chairs brings us with a gentle thud to the other half-formed, already crumbling proto-continent in SA, the one inhabited by the opposition. Here too unity is a pipe dream.
The progressive caucus was a brave attempt to disguise the fact that both MK and the EFF were founded purely to massage the bruised hearts of their founders, but cracks are already widening into chasms. Of course, they’re all still making the right noises, whether it’s Julius Malema writing in the Sunday Times explaining how relieved he is not to be part of the GNU (for realsies), or MK’s Thulani Gamede choosing to wear camouflage fatigues to get sworn in as an MP — presumably to enable him to disappear into the nearest hedge when Jacob Zuma inevitably ambles closer to fire him because Duduzile said so.
But a new country is forming under our feet, and for many of our politicians on both sides of the aisle that means a desperate scramble to higher, safer ground, no matter which comrades and alliance partners they need to climb over to get there.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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