Knackered South Africans might be starting to look forward to their holiday in a few weeks but things are just getting warmed up for Msholozi’s kakistocracy Ponzi (MKP) as it finds itself sitting on the mother lode of a new political gold rush.
Admittedly, not all the people hastening to join Jacob Zuma’s party are cynics and mercenaries. The latest, former KwaZulu-Natal premier Willies Mchunu, says he is moving because the ANC, which was “established to unite black people”, had chosen to “unite with white people and alienate black people” and had therefore “lost its way”.
Fair enough. I mean, state capture and Marikana and Life Esidimeni and Nkandla and the collapse of ANC-run metros are one thing. But for the ANC to form a government of national unity with white parties such as the DA and Freedom Front Plus, or other white parties such as the IFP and UDM or Patriotic Alliance or RISE Mzansi, or the notoriously white PAC, well, that’s just not on.
I’ve also started suspecting that a few new recruits genuinely believe that MKP is a kind of ark in which the true ANC will shelter as political tides sweep away those degenerates who want sinful things such as functioning municipalities, democratic institutions, legitimate elections and children who can read.
For the rest, however, MKP offers a free for all; a new frontier in which all people are equal as long as they know they are less equal than Zuma, and the only thing anyone has to fear is the courts and perhaps accidentally stopping clapping before everyone else.
Certainly, the anointing of Floyd “Jacob Zuma Will Kill You All” Shivambu as MKP secretary-general at the weekend will have sent a fresh thrill through the party faithful, reiterating, as it did, that MKP is an organisation run entirely by whim and edict. There was no elective conference, no list, no democratic mandate. The glowing finger of Msholozi simply reached down and, ping!, Shivambu was appointed. And if the finger can touch a man who publicly compared Zuma to Idi Amin then surely anyone can be fingered ...
Then there is also the issue of Zuma’s age. No-one wants to think of these things but life is not infinite and at some point the fatal illness that forced Zuma to take medical parole will catch up with him and he will be no more. It goes without saying that MKP will fall apart about seven minutes later, but a sharp-eyed cadre can still lay claim to plenty of political territory in seven minutes.
Best of all, despite being less than a year old and having won the support of just less than 9% of registered voters, MKP is this week being compared to the supercharged Republican party in the US, a party that will in January become the world’s most powerful. You will no doubt have read some of these analyses and the clear line they draw between a disgruntled citizenry feeling ever poor and the rise of populism and the spectre of autocracy.
To be fair, some of the parallels are pretty clear, most notably the political mileage both Donald Trump and Zuma have made out of trying to claim that legitimate elections were rigged. (I’m sure you share my surprise that the — checks notes — totally corrupt US electoral system, rigged by the Deep State to make sure a Republican could never win, is in fact 100% honest and reliable, but that’s another story.)
I’m not sure, however, that economic comparisons between MAGA and MKP hold up entirely.
Trump has said very little about economic policy that is even faintly coherent, and most of what appears in the press has been something between divination and intellectual astroturfing, with the Trump media machine sieving through hundreds of hours of fragmented, stream-of-consciousness anecdotes about windmills and the size of Arnold Palmer’s genitals and turning them into The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.
What most of his supporters believe however, is that he is offering to put within their grasp a better, more reliable, more affordable version of the American dream™ they either remember from the 1950s and 60s, or have been told about, without, obviously, the part about how that dream was funded by vastly higher tax rates and the rich actually paying their share. He has, in short, promised to give them an economy they already want.
MKP, on the other hand, with its promise to expropriate and own all land, isn’t offering a tweak of the current system. It is offering something completely different, and there isn’t evidence that a majority of South Africans want it.
Even among those who support redistributive land reform there must be some hesitation about the abolition of private ownership. After all, some of those who are pursuing restorative justice are doing so not because they want to become farmers but rather to unlock the capital that is rightly theirs so they can have the life they want in an urban, capitalist system.
Even if an MKP government relented and offered some compensation, who would oversee the process? Andile Mngxitama and Brian Molefe? A local bishop relying on holy visions to ascertain the amount payable?
Luckily for MKP however, it won’t win an election this year. These questions can wait. For now, it’s time to get down to the real work: securing positions and patronage, and praying for that sweet, sweet golden finger ...
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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