TOM EATON | Give ActionSA some love for bumbling admission of defeat

I understand the risk inherent in telling you upfront that this column is about ActionSA.

I want you to read beyond the first paragraph, and I know that for the strained attention spans of most readers Herman Mashaba’s party and its machinations are a chloroform-soaked hanky straight to the face.

This isn’t just an unkind hunch on my part. Statistics confirm that very, very few of you care about this, with ActionSA supported by one adult in every 250, or, in some cases, by one adult.

Still, I think the weekend’s shenanigans, in which the party apparently faked a vox pop walkabout in Joburg, are worth lingering on for a moment as they’re spun this way and that in an election year.

For full disclosure I should tell you right now that I know precious little about ActionSA, which, to a Capetonian like myself, is one of those slightly alien, upsetting things they have in Joburg, like friendliness, homes you can afford, systemic collapse and leadership apparently drawn from the naughty corner at a daycare for toddlers of middling ability.

In my defence, though, even the party’s most vocal supporters, currently asking the boom operator to hold onto their Herman4Eva lapel pins so they can start getting into character as Random Johannesburg Citizen #3, would have to admit that its brand has been a bit vague.

Perhaps this was inevitable for a party formed in opposition to the opposition: positioning itself as Not The DA while the DA was branding itself as Not The ANC was always going to leave it in the tricky position of ending up as Not The Party That Is Not The ANC.

And this is to say nothing of how hard it is to maintain any kind of ideological integrity in the endless principle-free churn of Joburg politics, a space one might call gladiatorial were it not for the fact that gladiators who were bad at their jobs tended to die, whereas South African politicians who are bad at their jobs become cabinet ministers.

All of which is to say I came to this weekend’s electioneering fiasco as most South Africans would have: knowing very little about the party and caring even less. Now that I’ve seen the videos, though, with national chairperson Michael Beaumont cuing up his secret amateur dramatics society to sing the party’s praises, I feel compelled to take an even bigger risk than trying to hold your attention with this story: I would like to defend ActionSA.

In our nightmarish present, in which broken, soul-dead billionaires compete to find new ways to destroy our humanity, I think it’s refreshing to encounter some genuine old-timey skulduggery harking back to a simpler, more boisterously human time.

The reason most reputable organisations don’t lie online is that we all understand that the internet is a public place frequented by lots of people, and that if enough people see your lie, someone will cry foul.

Beaumont’s scheme might have involved social media, but at its heart it was exactly the sort of thing some greasy good ‘ole boy would have cooked up in a gubernatorial race in Alabamy of the 1920s, and, as someone who enjoys reading about the past, I could almost smell the cigar smoke, whiskey and desperation.

Then there’s the question of why we’re being asked to denounce ActionSA for this stunt when, one could argue, it was simply South African politics in microcosm: a ritual in which party leaders gather their supporters together and then pretend they’re speaking to — and for — the country as a whole.

When the ANC performs its own silly fiction, claiming to represent “the masses” while backed by about 16% of eligible voters, or the DA delivers a parallel state of the nation speech while representing less than 9% of it, we shrug. So why the double standards now?

Mostly, though, the reason I’m struggling to condemn ActionSA for this silliness is that it was such a transparent and bumbling admission of defeat that I want to give them all a big hug.

The reason most reputable organisations don’t lie online is that we all understand that the internet is a public place frequented by lots of people, and that if enough people see your lie, someone will cry foul.

It’s possible that some of the spin doctors who came up with the idea thought it was gold. ActionSA clearly thought it would dazzle the rubes. But I would humbly submit that by going ahead with it, both of them were admitting that they didn’t think enough people would see it to raise the alarm.

The aim was low, and it still missed. Seriously, somebody please give them a hug.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.