TOM EATON: President causes shock in ANC by trying to raise intellectual capacity

A few years ago a young man stood up in front of parliament and the whole of SA and told us Jacob Zuma was a dictator on a par with Idi Amin who would end up killing members of his own party in a desperate bid to stay out of prison. 

“The reason Africa is referred to as a dark continent,” he proclaimed, “is because we’ve got postcolonial disasters, impostors, thugs, criminals who by coincidence, accident or by design find themselves occupying the highest political office in their land.”

These thugs and criminals, he said, included the likes of Amin, Sani Abacha, Mobutu Sese Seko, and now “unfortunately a Mr Jacob Zuma”.

To this young man Zuma’s future trajectory was clear. Eventually, he warned the ANC’s backbenchers, “he’s going to arrest you, he’s going to lock you up, he’s going to kill you”. 

“He’s got nothing to lose now!” he cried as the chamber erupted. “He knows that if he doesn’t have political power, he’s going to be going to prison!” 

When the frazzled speaker ordered him to withdraw his statements, he doubled down.

“All dictators, after they steal government money and they enrich their families ... their last option is to kill their opponents ... Jacob Zuma is going to kill you, all of you who are sitting on his side now.” 

He was slightly less grim on Twitter, but his views on Zuma were still clear: as a vote of no confidence loomed he urged fellow MPs to “remove Duduzane’s father (Guptas’ private property) from office” while also offering “a word of encouragement to the cadres who voted against a No 1 criminal: be guiltless and nothing will happen to you. History will absolve you.” 

Of course, history can’t always be relied on to absolve you in just the way you want, especially not when you’re Floyd Shivambu and you’ve just landed a lucrative job with the guy you compared to a thieving mass-murderer.

Sometimes it’s far quicker and safer just to delete all your tweets, which is why you won’t find either of those two on Shivambu’s X account any more.

But TV footage is harder to erase, and so over the weekend Shivambu put on his best flip-flops and padded over to Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh’s podcast to explain that he had been wrong to repeat “all sorts of nonsensical characterisations” of the man who is now paying his bills. 

Shivambu has been described by many as the brains of the EFF, a claim that somehow manages to libel both Julius Malema and him at the same time, but on the podcast he did at times sing very sweetly and quite impressively for his supper.

Reflecting on those difficult years of endlessly taking a stand on a matter of principle that had since turned out to be less lucrative than he’d hoped, Shivambu noted that the EFF’s campaign against Zuma had been “coincidentally joined by the establishment, and mostly the descendants of the settlers who got to go and do the Zuma Must Fall nonsense”.

It was a nice little aside, clearly reiterating the founding tenet of Zuma’s new party — that he is the victim of a racist conspiracy — while simultaneously creating a subtle but potent association between the EFF and those wicked counter-revolutionaries.

Of course, he didn’t try to explain why he had personally pushed the agenda of the descendants of the settlers quite so hard at the time, or whether he’d been a useful idiot or a willing one. But that’s the great thing about personality cults — the moment you prostrate yourself before your new Big Daddy you are reborn, your past washed away as thoroughly as if it had been laundered VBS cash. 

It was quite a spectacle, one that will have been watched intently by many in the ANC who are unsure whether they want to stay in the party after Sunday night’s shock announcement by Cyril Ramaphosa that they will soon be required to have read a book and know the difference between right and wrong.

Delivering the OR Tambo memorial lecture to an audience that would have included at least one cadre who thought OR Tambo was an airport, Ramaphosa revealed that his party would be introducing a compulsory “foundational course”.

This, he explained, was being done in the hopes of “raising the intellectual capacity and enhancing the moral and ethical orientation of ANC leaders and members”. 

For those most in need of having their intellectual capacity raised, the announcement would have held few terrors, mainly because they wouldn’t have understood what Ramaphosa was saying. For the rest though, it would have come as a shock.

I mean, being honest and well read is all very well if you’re an airport, but this is a party whose current deputy secretary-general once crowed that if appointing Malusi Gigaba as finance minister crashed the rand the ANC would pick it up again, and who was accused at the Zondo Commission of being bribed with booze and braai packs.

If you want intellect and conscience, go work in a primary school, sucker. Luckily though, they can all relax thanks to the fundamental flaw of a test designed to reform the stupid and the corrupt: the former simply pay the latter to make it go away.

And if that doesn’t work, they can always delete some tweets and go and genuflect next to Floyd. 

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.