Over the weekend, as I was whisked around an idyllically autumnal Johannesburg, something peculiar happened: I started seeing things the ANC’s way.
Of course there are usually rational explanations for supernatural phenomena, and at first I ascribed the change to the fact that I was in town to punt my new novel and was therefore thinking like a writer of comic fiction. That is, like an ANC policy adviser.
It was also possible, I speculated, that the high altitude was causing the change, the lack of oxygen giving me the giddiness and heart palpitations of a cadre with half a forestry degree applying for the tender to supply uranium to Koeberg.
But as I acclimatised I finally understood why everything seemed so pleasant: just like a cabinet minister, I was seeing Johannesburg from the back seat of a car. And I can tell you, the psychological effect was profound.
In Cape Town all we hear is that Johannesburg is dying. Admittedly, we usually hear it from recent semigrants from Gauteng, trying to convince themselves they have done the right thing by moving into a house that is slightly smaller than their SUV. But still, they tell a convincing tale.
Yet ensconced in the cocoon of the back seat those tales seemed little more than doom-mongering. As we blasted down gloriously free-flowing freeways, now and then veering left or right (more of this in a moment), billboard after billboard revealed that business in Johannesburg is booming.
Granted, that business is online gambling, but the billboards’ unabashed confidence, their resolute refusal to acknowledge the misery they spread, filled me with the dopamine high ANC leaders must feel when they tell the punters to put everything on black, green and gold one more time — despite everyone knowing the house always wins.
It was the total absence of potholes that most made me feel the bullish confidence of an ANC minister. Certainly, those occasional swerves to left and right kept happening, making my head bobble on my neck like that of an 82-year-old member of the party’s national executive committee about to fall asleep during a speech on the importance of renewal.
But from deep within my revolutionary mindset it was easy to imagine that the road was in perfect condition and we were simply jinking to avoid groups of children who had heard we were approaching and had come singing and dancing into the street.
To be fair, I did see one anomaly in the road ahead of us when my driver said, “Yoh” (which my cadre consciousness interpreted as shorthand for “Yohannesburg is doing so well under ANC rule”) and looked up.
The old me might have called it a crater, or a small geological upheaval, or what happens when the centre cannot hold and things fall apart, mostly because the centre is Fikile Mbalula. But the new me saw the rich, red earth and the first pretty little green shoots pushing up through it.
I saw only abundance, as if Yohannesburg was spontaneously growing a tiny farm right here in the street, a way station to nourish its happy people as they trundled past on flat tyres.
For years we’ve demanded that the ministerial class be stripped of its coddling luxuries so that it wakes up to the realities of the blight it has helped spread.
Now I realise we might not even have to go that far: it turns out just getting our rulers to drive their own cars might be enough to bring them back to earth — or, if the pothole is particularly bad, about a foot under it — with a bump.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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