Some South Africans are unhappy that President Cyril Ramaphosa met Elon Musk in New York last week, but I get it: just as it can sometimes soothe us to look up at the vastness of the stars, so too it can be a balm to the soul when you’re worth $450m to stand before someone worth 600 times more and ponder the great mysteries, like how many couches it would take to hide $270bn.
Of course, I also understand the controversy. Even as an industrialist Musk has split public opinion, with some believing him to be an engineering genius and brilliant leader, while others, who can read, don’t.
Personally I think his reusable rockets are astonishing, and I know they’ll be a great source of consolation and inspiration to humanity as we sit, contemplatively chewing on microplastics, watching them come and go to the new artificial moon made entirely out of Botox, fillers and restraining orders from estranged family members, where the billionaires go to pitch their newest inventions to each other, like breakfast and cheese and public transport.
However, as a propagandist with his thumb on the political and societal scales Musk is a very different prospect. Certainly, as the owner of X, and therefore one of the world’s largest and most prolific publishers of white supremacist and fascist content, he doesn’t seem like the sort of person Ramaphosa would sidle up to, awkwardly babbling about a “bromance” and wanting to kindle a “love affair” between Musk and SA.
Still, I can see some of the sense behind the presidency reaching out to Musk’s PA’s assistant’s intern and asking for a photo op, and not only because it provided proof of life for those of us who haven’t seen Ramaphosa for a while.
For a president of a country whose GDP is slightly smaller than that of the state of Missouri, posing with Musk was a cheap and potent way to remind Wall Street that SA isn’t just the blur at the bottom of the smudge to the left of Saudi Arabia. Ramaphosa knew he was talking absolute nonsense when he insisted that SA is Musk’s “home” — Musk emigrated to Canada when he was 18.
Besides, do billionaires, being merely the fleshy appendix of capital, really live anywhere? After the past few years of shuffling closer to the Brics bloc it wasn’t a bad tactic to hammer home the fact that one of capitalism’s largest golden calves came from Pretoria.
Having said that though, I do understand the discomfort and distaste of those who watched Ramaphosa, the inheritor of the party of Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela, awkwardly ingratiate himself with a man who has amplified the myth of white genocide and is a strong supporter of the presidential candidate who considers large swathes of Africa to be a “shithole”.
But with all due respect to those people and their objections, I’m not sure this is anything particularly new. After all, Ramaphosa has in his own cabinet a certain Pieter Groenewald, representing a party that only exists because Andries Treurnicht thought PW Botha was too liberal.
Instead, I suspect Ramaphosa’s little “Pick Me!” moment with Musk is something we’re going to see a lot more of in the coming months and years as he and his government of notional unity grope their way through a multipolar, aggressively partisan world, cautiously and sometimes paradoxically feeling out a path of almost constant ideological compromise.
It’s already throwing up peculiar sights, such as John Steenhuisen — he who posed grimly over an exploded Russian projectile in Ukraine — pressing the flesh in China even as that country sends drones to Russia to be used to attack Ukraine. For those of us watching from the sidelines this shift towards more compromising — and, to many supporters, compromised — leadership is confusing.
For decades our system has preached a form of political monogamy. You married one party, and you stayed married to it for life, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Of course divorces do happen, and if you absolutely needed to cut ties and shack up with that other lot your best friends would understand, even if they didn’t really want to talk about it.
Now, in a dazzlingly short space of time we’ve all moved into a Kombi and found ourselves neck-deep in polyamory, without knowing any of the rules or even whether they apply at all levels of government, like in Johannesburg, where the new grooviness has been rejected in favour of the old binaries — them versus us and to hell with the citizenry.
No, it’s all very confusing. But for me one of the strangest things of all in this new set-up is the paradox at the heart of the GNU, namely that the better it works, the less likely it is to survive in 2029. The GNU is still enjoying a honeymoon period, at least with the press, and apart from the odd Thembi Simelane loan, the narrative is still relatively sunny. But the fact remains that in its current form the GNU is the mathematical representation of the disillusionment of ANC voters.
If it holds and begins to deliver tangible progress over the next four years, and Jacob Zuma’s MK party starts faltering, it is only logical that many of those voters will come back. And if enough of them come back...
A strange bromance, indeed.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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