With election fever coursing through South Africa, there are many hack actors bedevilling the melodrama that constitutes SA politics. Overseeing this all is the spirit of Madiba who most still hold dear. Many try to bask in his reflected glory and humanity by claiming a bit for themselves. However, few are worthy.
There is the weeny whinge, Mbeki the pseudo-intellectual, who has been trundled out to justify the 30 years of ANC mismanagement. In true blinkered form, he blames third forces and the counter revolutionary agents of Apartheid and the Stellenbosch cabal for foisting Zuma, and hence State Capture, upon us by getting rid of himself in 2007.
There is Zuma, apex cockroach, who cannot be killed even though a doctor declared him terminally ill two years ago. He has emerged Phoenix-like to lead the MK Party, a party with a cobbled together manifesto consisting of RET gripes. His ethnic base and popularity in KZN is causing ructions in the ANC who don’t know whether to discipline him or not. For them he’s an Inconvenient Oaf.
Much like him is that Inconvenient Youth and fulltime rabble-rouser, Malema, who caused a schism in the ANC and routinely foments mayhem in Parliament. He continues to dispense racist rhetoric like shots of tequila at an EFF 2023 10th anniversary party.
In 2012 I drew up a table comparing the Presidents (and an aspiring one) which I have dusted off to see if history has treated them more kindly or more unkindly than I. Judge for yourself. I thought about updating the table to include the super supine, Cyril, our very own frog boiler, but I found too little that was standout about him. He is like a blob of playdoh in the creche called Luthuli House. He has no definition. He has a blob nose on a blob head on a blob body and plods around saying “I am shocked!” when finding out about the latest misdeeds of the deployed cadres. No one listens to him. Even he doesn’t listen to him.
