ANC’s top brass remain the butt of the joke

It’s a very confusing time for South African politics. There is so much going on, on so many fronts, that it’s all but impossible to keep up. And, moreover, all this is going on more or less simultaneously. What lies ahead in the next month or so may be something akin to the “perfect storm” of which weather forecasters speak when winds from different directions converge and the waves rise higher than a 10-storey building.

We should imagine the South African Ship of State, actually a small boat that has lost most of its oars and certainly its sails, and is navigating without a (moral) compass, being tossed hither and thither upon the waves of destiny. This naturally makes ordinary citizens feel a bit insecure, not to mention seasick, so we’ve decided to pick out a few significant moments, or momentary significances, to help readers get through this festive period and understand what’s going on.

Not only is the ANC gearing up for its leadership conference next month, so that the “party of liberation” can give the nation a new Top Six for Christmas, but some people who may possibly have been responsible for last year’s rioting, looting and murder (reassuringly tagged a “failed insurrection”) are now on trial, or have at least had some charges put to them, a mere year and a bit after the devastating events. This swift action by our police force is an achievement unparalleled as yet during the tenure of Police Minister Bheki “All Hat, No Cattle” Cele, who only needs 24 vehicles in his motorcade when he visits small South African towns to tell them how much he and his police force are doing for them, which includes shooting them for their own good.

Jacob “Mystery Ailment” Zuma, former president of the Republic of Guptastan, is facing another two months (Two months? It’ll kill him!) in jail because the parole gifted to him by his faithful former spymaster Arthur “Toad” Fraser has been declared invalid in court. If Zoomy has to go back to jail, well, then the nation faces another eight days of “unrest”, or perhaps this time round we could stretch to 16.

After all, KwaZulu-Natal will have a tourist-free festive season this year anyway, what with the beaches polluted by all that excrement flowing lumpily but freely down from the shattered purification sites into the pearly waves. That’s what happens when a waste tender worth a few hundreds of millions is put on hold just because former Chieftain Zanele “Battleaxe” Gumede and a few of her closest cadres are soon to go on trial for manipulating that tender. It is comforting, of course, that even if that tender had been successfully concluded Gumede et al would not have spent it on waste disposal. I mean, for crying in a bucket, they have lifestyles to maintain. And the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal needs a few million to buy the branches and to pay the assassins hired from the taxi mafia to take out whistle-blowers.

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Still, it seems exquisitely apposite that luxurious Umhlanga, where the Jacob Gedleyaarghurghehehe Zuma Foundation has its well-appointed offices, is the most polluted. The beaches there are entirely closed, possibly because some of that excrement flowed directly from the foundation’s offices down on to the beach. Serves those darn white holidaymakers right, really!

I’m sure the amateur ideologues like Zoomy’s daughter Duduzile “Burn It Down!” Zuma-Sambudla is already sharpening the nails on her Twitter fingers in readiness for the next orgy of looting, and possibly even doing some extra work in the gym so that she can once more display her buttocks to the nation as encouragement. Twitter, after all, has been bought by a formerly South African billionaire, who has guaranteed free speech on the platform, and what speech is freer than Dudu’s arse?

It’s not quite clear to me why Dudu’s buttocks, politely known as her Kardashians, should have become a weapon of struggle for the right to loot the state, but some aspects of ANC factional or family politics are understood only by very senior figures such as Pallo “Doctor” Jordan. We await his analysis. We’ve sent him some questions about Dudu’s political bum and have given him 20 years to formulate a reply. After all, he’s only just finished his Let us introspect document for the ANC’s 2022 leadership conference, and he has been working on that since Thabo Mbeki was in power.

If only he’d finished it in time for Polokwane in 2007. Zuma’s Coalition of the Corrupt might have read it and been so baffled they would have withdrawn from competition. Or maybe not. There’s no evidence they can read, although they are surely gobbling up the ancient speeches reprinted in that inestimable volume, Jacob Zuma Speaks, which is on sale once more, the first 30 copies having sold out in record time last year. (It is said that co-editor Sipho “Soapy” Seepe, a professor of misgovernance at the University of Umgungundlovu, is working secretly on the sequel, which we hope against hope will be titled Jacob Zuma Shuts Up.)

But let us not be distracted by the toils of literature from our chief focus, which is ANC leadership. Like the ANC itself, the nation should be focused entirely on what political studies majors call “elite competition” (the driver of history), which is a spectacle more exciting than a Football World Cup in a stadium that a few thousand Gastarbeiters died to build.

A key moment in this battle was when Bathabile “Perjury” Dlamini got up in support of Zweli “Innocent Until Proven Guilty” Mkhize’s campaign for the ANC presidency. Mostly, it must be said, she confined herself to battering President Cyril “Rama Soft” Ramaphosa’s credentials. Her Trump card, ha ha, was to accuse Cyril of taking advice from white people. It’s unclear whether she’s referring to André de Ruyter or King Charles, but it’s outrageous. Honestly, black presidents should not take advice from white people. They shouldn’t even ask.

She forgets, perhaps, how much advice she took from those foreign crooks running the social welfare payments she was in charge of as minister of social development. For heaven’s sake, she even lied for them in court. And that’s not smallanyana.

She has probably forgotten, too, how much advice Oliver Tambo took from Joe Slovo, back in the glory days when the Communist Party was in charge of ANC policy, tactics, strategy, funding and armed propaganda. Or how much advice Nomvula “Chicken Pieces” Mokonyane took from Bosasa’s white head honchos (okay, that was probably about table settings), or the wisdom that was imparted to the corruption faction of the ANC by Bell Pottinger, all a bunch of old white men, and British imperialists at that. Her beloved Jacob Zuma, of course, was advised and represented by white advocates for most of his still-in-progress legal war, only recently acquiring the expensive services of Dali “Waffle Waffle” Mpofu, who is at least technically black.

What we must do, oh people of South Africa, is look with hope towards the trial of another 20 or so people accused of fomenting the July 2021 unrest. One of them is named God’s Surprise Ntuli, and we must take this as a sign from above. Let us pray that what is left of 2022 offers us only God’s surprises, not the ANC’s. DM168

Shaun de Waal is a writer and editor.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.