TOM EATON | Trump gave Americans angels, Cyril only has pie in the sky

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s legal and political advisers will be giving him all sorts of advice as the spectre of impeachment begins to loom over him again, but his next move is surely obvious: he must emulate Donald Trump by trying to distract everyone by releasing blurry videos of UFOs.

Of course, Ramaphosa finds himself in a slightly better position than Trump, not being trapped in a quagmire of his own making in the Persian Gulf that looks set to unleash economic devastation on the world.

Indeed, right now our president might even tell himself, entirely truthfully, that he is the commander of a navy that is, on current form, the equal of the mighty US fleet: neither of them can keep the Straits of Hormuz open.

Still, the prospect of impeachment will be making Ramaphosa feel alarmed, or at least feel whatever it is billionaires feel when confronted with the possibility that their lives of extreme comfort and security might be about to change subtly and force them to experience fractionally different sorts of comfort and security.

All of which is why the UFO ploy might not be a bad thing to try right about now. He wouldn’t even have to fake anything: if our politics have shown us anything about ourselves, it’s that you only have to point up at some pie in the sky, and millions of South Africans will mistake it for manna from heaven.

In our defence, we’re not the only ones: at the weekend, after Trump flung all sorts of UFO-related bumph at the news cycle like a fleeing squid squirting ink in all directions, some Americans began insisting that what Trump had finally revealed was photographic evidence of angels and demons.

One particular image, showing a blob with eight spikes radiating out of it — a flare suspended under a parachute, according to aviation experts — was seized upon by the more frenzied denizens of the right-wing internet as the first photograph ever taken of a seraph, the mythical six-winged school prefects of the celestial realm.

Of course, intellectual humility demands that we admit how much we don’t know, and it is theoretically possible that this was, in fact, a seraph, or a seraph trying not to blow our puny minds by thoughtfully disguising itself as a flare dangling under a parachute.

But if we’re really going to go there and consider the possibility that there are, in fact, aliens, and that the aliens are, in fact, angels, then I for one am very curious about how this new brand of American theology will square itself with the experiences claimed by many fellow Americans who insist they’ve been abducted and had their unmentionables probed by said visitors.

Imagine the debates as the two schools — eschatological and scatological — find common ground in a new doctrine celebrating the mysticism of the probe and the new rites of having to sit on an inflatable rubber ring for a few days after one’s conversion…

But I digress. The point is that Ramaphosa could do worse than launch a few seraphim of his own, especially now that his biggest partner in the government of national unity, the DA, has said it won’t try to save him from impeachment.

According to new DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis, doing so “would be sweeping wrongdoing under the carpet just because it’s politically convenient to ensure the survival of this government. That would be completely unacceptable.”

Hill-Lewis has clearly reached Chapter Four in the DA user manual, titled “Sweeping Wrongdoing Under The Carpet: It Depends”, and has been reminded that it’s entirely acceptable to sweep wrongdoing under the carpet to save the government when it’s 2024 and you’ve just formed a fragile government of national unity and Helen Zille has told Eyewitness News that “we have agreed that we won’t make the government unstable by voting votes of no confidence in each other all the time”, but it is entirely unacceptable when it’s 2026, the ANC is in freefall, the Zuma faction is a hot mess and the stakes are far, far lower.

Ramaphosa is unpopular. His impeachment, were it to happen, would be welcomed by people across the political spectrum. Paradoxically, though, it would also mean that he’d been a victim of his own success, having steadied the ship for long enough so that his opponents could set aside their all-hands-to-the-pump pragmatism and indulge in the luxury of having some principles.

For now, though, he will listen to his advisers, weigh his options and, just maybe, briefly wonder about the usefulness of seraphim.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.