GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Zuma, the king of banality

Few things are more remarkable than president’s question time in the national assembly. Jacob Zuma, fundamentally compromised on a wide variety of fronts, holds court for two hours every three months, in deference to the constitutional demand that the legislature hold the executive to account. Alas, to no avail. It is, perhaps, the ultimate pretence — a game, essentially. And there is only ever one winner: Zuma.

When it is all done, inevitably you are left feeling defeated, as if he got away with something — which, of course, he did.

But you are not quite sure how. Questions were put. Answers were given. And yet, it’s as if question time never took place at all.

President’s question time has become an exercise in futility — with the president always walking away, unscathed by the encounter

Yes, the rules are stacked. Questions are submitted two weeks prior to the occasion, robbing the exchange of spontaneity and relevance. The speaker rarely, if ever, actually regulates the president’s replies — the fact that words come out of his mouth seems to be enough to satisfy the demand that he “answer” the political puzzles put to him.

And the ANC’s majority allows it to dominate the question paper, an opportunity it uses to ridicule oversight by posing only the most inane inquiries, the answers to which could be easily gleaned from any given departmental website.

If last week’s question time was anything to go by, the problem is often supplemented by the opposition, the members of which ask questions no less futile in conception and effect. After a long series of introductory remarks — so long, in fact, he almost didn’t get to ask a question at all — DA leader Mmusi Maimane eventually got to the crux of his concern: “Does the president believe he is the best person to lead SA?”

No prizes for guessing Zuma’s response to that particular conundrum: “I’m fit and I am doing it very well.” You almost feel he could have added, “Next?”

And so it goes. It is an exercise in futility. And yet we keep playing. Because it’s the only game we’ve got.

Looking on from the outside, the paradox you are left with is this: how is it possible that someone so profoundly enmeshed in a categorical crisis is able to escape, week after week, any real sense of acknowledgment or contrition? That is what you expect of any cross-examination: that the facts – of which there are many when it comes to Zuma – are placed before the accused in such compelling fashion that he or she must face them and acquiesce to their veracity. But not Zuma. That is to assume he sees the world through your eyes. And he does not.

And yet there is more to it than that. Zuma exudes some additional quality, hard to define but which aids his evasiveness. He seems to revel in a kind of obvious facileness, so mundane in its formulation and simultaneously so obscure and irrelevant it leaves you befuddled. Not so much Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil as the evil of banality.

He said last week, in response to a question from the Freedom Front’s Corné Mulder about his attitude regarding the idea of a secret ballot: “You are trying to get a majority you don’t have, by saying ‘secret ballot’. I think it’s not fair because you are trying to increase the majority you don’t have.”

Well, yes. Obviously. The entire point of any vote, of lobbying and persuasion, is to get a majority. It’s how you win. That’s politics. And yes, the opposition is trying to use every mechanism at its disposal to that end. But that’s not the point.

Looking on from the outside, the paradox you are left with is this: how is it possible that someone so profoundly enmeshed in a categorical crisis is able to escape, week after week, any real sense of acknowledgment or contrition?

The idea of a secret ballot, and the debate that surrounds it, is about far more than mere political pragmatism. It represents a fairly significant moment in the maturation of our democracy — a test for block voting and the majoritarianist thinking that informs it. It might not work in practice, or on this particular occasion, but in the grand scheme of things, it is a metaphor for so many problems that undermine our democracy, from the lack of a constituency-based electoral system to the impartiality, or lack of it, of the speaker of parliament.

It is a chance to speak to history; to evoke and explain principle, whether to defend or uphold it. In short, it is an opportunity, to step outside the contemporary universe and leave a deeper mark on the SA story. So many leaders would leap at the chance. Not Zuma.

He has no sense of history, no sense of principle or precedent. He doesn’t talk to the ages. He talks to the ANC back benches. That is not to suggest his answers are apolitical. He is in a fight and bravado is to be expected. Only, he has no sense of occasion. Every development is one-dimensional and ephemeral to his mind.

He is not so much a president as he is a photocopying machine. You can feed into him any problem, of any magnitude, and he will produce it back for you; a poor black and white replica that leaves you looking at your own insight as if it were no insight at all. It can be infuriating.

It is easy enough to dismiss this trait as born of ignorance or the product of a mind too prosaic to be alive to such things as history. No doubt there is much truth to that.

But that is too simple an explanation. There is something else, more sinister, underpinning it all. There is the contempt and arrogance, which Zuma exudes in spades, but more still. Inherent to his attitude is the idea that the ANC is history and so there is simply nothing else to be written.

Zuma said in response to Maimane, of the ANC’s metro losses in 2016: “You are actually encouraging us to cause a re-election in these places, so that we can take our thing back.”

You see this kind of entitlement through all of Zuma’s thinking, inside and outside parliament. “We should not allow anyone to govern our city (Cape Town) when we are ruling the country,” he said from the stump in May 2008. And it’s not particular to Zuma either. “This area, this municipality, belongs to the ANC”, said Winnie Madikizela-Mandela of Midvaal, then the only DA-run municipality in Gauteng, ahead of the 2011 local government elections.

For those who would call Zuma an aberration, it is worth considering that almost every problematic sentiment he has expressed, has been expressed in turn by someone else in the ANC. He is really just a mirror, in which you can see many of the ANC’s most base impulses reflected back. It’s not a pleasant sight. All this is relayed with a smile and, inevitably, a giggle. But it is gallows humour. He is laughing at how futile it all is.

For Zuma, question time is not so much an interrogation of his presidency or his personal conduct as it is a nicety, to be indulged like any one of a hundred other trivial obligations that dominate his diary. It is irrelevant because his answers are irrelevant, even to his own mind.

He believes that, outside of himself, there are far more powerful forces at play. Of these, the most powerful is the ANC itself. And he is swept up in its wake just like everyone else is. He is just an observer, a watcher. He is there to describe events, not interpret or direct them.

Question time in its entirety is an indictment of SA democracy and an illustration of just how weak it is. It is an indictment of parliament in particular, and of the speaker.

There is no reality in which Zuma should not walk away from a session like that feeling humbled and embarrassed. There is simply too much he has to account for. But it is a cakewalk, and he bumbles his way through it all seemingly without so much as a political scratch.

At the same time, it is a powerful illustration of just how incompatible the ANC is with the demands of a modern constitutional democracy. Last week Meokgo Matuba, secretary-general of the ANC Women’s League, advocated doing away with constitutional democracy altogether, and a return to parliamentary sovereignty. President’s question time gives you a glimpse into just what that world would look like.

Above it all, perched on his throne, is the King of Banality, first and foremost contemptuous of any world that seeks to impose itself on him or his party but, in the moment, unable to articulate anything more than the inane character of the fantasy that has him in its grasp.