TOM EATON: DA has lost its voice as it quietly beavers away in GNU

It’s been business as usual from the ANC lately. Or, in the absence of business, at least busyness as usual. But as the familiar apparatchiks bang their toy drums and dribble apple sauce down their bibs, one traditionally raucous corner seems to have fallen oddly silent.

Of course, it’s been a long year and not everyone still has the emotional wherewithal to react to the blurtings that have become the only real output of the party formerly known as governing. And to be fair, there wasn’t anything particularly controversial in the news that the ANC’s provincial secretary in KwaZulu-Natal, Bheki Mtolo, is in trouble for suggesting that Cyril Ramaphosa is weaker than Jacob Zuma in that province. 

After all, it is obviously true that Zuma is more popular than Ramaphosa there, and it’s also obviously true that middle management can’t circulate memos suggesting that the CEO isn’t as good at his job as the CEO of the main competitor. Still, I found Mtolo’s alleged claim interesting because of what it whispered from between the lines about the ANC’s view of leadership in a constitutional democracy.

It goes without saying that when we read things attributed to “unnamed insiders” we should listen out for the sound of personal axes being ground into razor-sharp edges; but if the insiders quoted in the Sunday Times are to be believed Mtolo’s report apparently boils down to the view that the ANC collapsed in KwaZulu-Natal in May because Ramaphosa is “weak, and Zuma is strong”. 

Mtolo was quick to deny this precis, advising those who spoke to the Sunday Times to “visit the Fort Napier [mental] hospital”, because, obviously, that’s how a senior representative of the people should speak about mental illness. It is safe to assume though, that many within the ANC believe Ramaphosa is a weak leader and that Zuma, for all his faults, is a stronger one. 

In other words, there is a fairly solid chance that a healthy number of ANC officials believe that a strong leader is one with a long trail of wreckage behind him, who avoids the law by hinting at public violence should anyone try to arrest him, who has lied about the legitimacy of a free and fair election, and who is now publicly suggesting trashing the constitutional democracy the ANC bled for in favour of semi-feudal autocracy.

Then again, the ANC has always enjoyed the odd flirt with autocrats, something we were reminded of at the weekend in an interview with the patron saint of roast chickens and people who smoke zol, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma. Expressing her displeasure that the ANC was working with the DA in a government of national unity (GNU), Dlamini Zuma said she had been “shocked” — shocked! — when John Steenhuisen insisted that Russia was not SA’s ally.

Russia, she reminded readers, had been a staunch ally of SA’s resistance struggle because, and I quote: “Russia has always been on the side of the oppressed.”

This will be a huge relief for the ghosts of the 4-million Ukrainians starved by Stalin, or the 14-million people who were sent to the gulags for asking whether he was, in fact, a perfect leader, or for simply having read a book, or the thousands of Hungarians who were killed by the Red Army for wanting democracy, or the 1-million Afghan civilians killed during the Soviet Union’s 10-year imperial adventure in that blighted country, or the 30,000 Ukrainian civilians killed in a country Vladimir Putin doesn’t believe exists. I mean, as long as it was all to help the oppressed, right? 

This is the traditional cue for many readers to point, quite rightly, at the bloody holes left by US foreign policy and the insatiable cravings of US capital in South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

It is also useful to be reminded that Moscow’s loudest critics have recently confirmed that their vaunted “rules-based order” is simply a wink and a handshake: last month the Wall Street Journal said the quiet part out loud in an editorial insisting that “the [International Criminal Court] is needed to help resolve war crimes in Russia, Sudan, Myanmar” but shouldn’t be brought to bear on war criminals such as Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The thing is, at this point only small children and a handful of fantasists in the US and London believe the Anglo-American bloc is a friend of the little guy. And yet on the other side of the ideological aisle, entire cabinet ministers such as Dlamini Zuma still crank out absurd lines that were already creaky when the Kremlin handed them out in 1980.

Then again, perhaps I can understand why Dlamini Zuma might not want too much historical reality to intrude: someone might remember that the same person bewailing working with the DA in 2024 was happy to work in a GNU in 1994 alongside actual ethno-fascists who had committed a crime against humanity. 

Yes, there’s still an awful lot of nonsense coming out of the ANC. But it feels different this time because it’s happening largely without something I’d started taking for granted: energetic and raucous objection from the DA. 

Is this what a noisy opposition sounds like when it has traded point-scoring for pragmatism and power-sharing? Or is this the relative silence of an organisation being subsumed and ground up in the gears of government? After all, in ANC space, nobody can hear you scream ... 

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.