Columns are dreadful beasts. Sometimes there’s just nothing to say. In London, on The Times, columnists and restaurant critic Giles Coren has made a feature of the fact that he can’t think of anything to write about. It’s become a podcast he does with his wife, and it even attracts advertising.
I was commissioned to write a book. The publisher paid me an advance. That was years ago. I’ve spent the money and I still can’t write a word. A column I can squeeze out. But that’s 900 words max. A book, eish; 100,000 minimum for something decent on yourself.
I sometimes wish I lived in a totalitarian state and suffered for my art. I wish I’d been one of those industrious journalists who’ve written books detailing the corruption under the ANC in SA over the past two decades. There’s the book launch, the radio and TV interviews. Signing copies and a sense of real achievement.
Columns aren’t like that. They pass like ships in the night, but, provided you understand the basic rules, you can still have fun writing them. The biggest rule is you have to commit. Whatever it is that you end up saying, you have to believe it with all your heart while you’re writing it. You can change your mind – and many of us frequently do – for the next column, but while you’re writing this one, this one you’re reading, trust me, I’m totally immersed in the project.
My job is to reach the end in a reasonable amount of words and to inform, entertain, amuse and irritate you in about equal measure. A column that doesn’t leave me feeling a little nervous and the reader cheering or cursing by the end is a failure. Either way.
I have been thinking about this recently because for years I have tracked the response to my columns on Twitter, which is where I gather information. I had paid little attention to the morning newsletters I get from Business Day and the FM, until one day about two weeks ago I clicked on a column of mine in the newsletter and read, literally for the first time ever, the comments from readers below. Oh. My. God.
I read them under one column and then the next and the next. It was staggering. The levels of bile and hatred and rage directed at me are off the charts. Mainly it was because I backed President Cyril Ramaphosa in the last election and he has been, let us not be shy here, a big disappointment. But would I do it again under the same circumstances, with a DA threatening to govern where it could in coalition with the EFF? I honestly think I would.
In particular, I have to take my hat off to a gentleman by the name of Andrew Merrifield, whose ability to hold a grudge and maintain galactic levels of anger, column in and column out, are just magnificent. Mainly I need to express my gratitude to him for reading me while also hating every word. Without Andrew Merrifields around, media in this country might as well pack up and go home. So while I hope I don’t end up on a dark street with Andrew, I do need him to know that I genuinely appreciate, as I have read them, his comments.
Even as these columns become more routinely critical of Ramaphosa (and I join the tail end of a snake of columnists), Andrew doesn’t let up. But he’s not alone. While writing this I have had a call from a good friend to ask whether I have heard that the national coronavirus command council has in fact become a silent coup d’état and that Ramaphosa is no longer running the country. Apparently, according to my friend, Bheki Cele has deep financial interests in the taxi industry, and the president was instructed only an hour in advance that alcohol was to be completely banned again.
“I doubt that,” I began to say to my caller. “Cyril can fire any minister he likes but his political calculation will always trump his economic one. He chooses not to make enemies who can prevent a second term.
“And besides,” I say, getting into my stride, “The ANC is still, by far, the only game in town. Imagine if he were to fall to the virus? Who would run the government then?”
My friend was silent and I knew, as I said it, that he would be smirking. “It’s not even playing devil’s advocate,” he offered slowly, “to suggest that that may have already happened.”
Oh dear. He is right. Ramaphosa has never looked weaker than he does now. His TV appearances have become just embarrassing. He is leaden and vacant and seems to be reading each script for the first time.
I don’t, though, subscribe to the coup theory. I don’t think Ace Magashule is running the ANC and I don’t think Ramaphosa is a coward.
His problem, though, is that it is increasingly hard to say what it is that he stands for. What would he roll up his sleeves and fight for? He stood up for himself when accused of corruption around his ANC election campaign. But you look at all the things that don’t happen because one or another interest group might not want it to and you have to conclude that he avoids confrontation whenever possible. That is not always fatal in politics, but in this country, at this time, walking directly towards your problems is the only way to fix them. He needs to take on the crooks in his own party and he knows it.
More politely, you’d say he chooses his battles. When he loses in the national executive committee, his attitude is “Well, let them vote for whatever, it won’t happen anyway”. And he has a point. Almost nothing the ANC says is policy ever happens. It can’t just have what it wants and he knows it. So why die in a ditch for it? Land expropriation without compensation is a case in point. So is SAA.
And some demons are being slain. We are still in the International Court of Justice. The public protector is in trouble and even though Cele was able to throw his weight around (he backed Ramaphosa for the ANC leadership after Jacob Zuma fired him) by firing Robert McBride from the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, Ramaphosa has been able to appoint him head of the external branch of our intelligence agency – where McBride will be hugely powerful internally and externally – because he has the support of intelligence minister Ayanda Dlodlo.
The Reserve Bank still stands strong and the National Treasury, burdened with a mercurial minister and hated by the left, is not going to bail out SAA and the government is going to stand firm on not paying out the third stage of a ridiculously generous public sector wage deal as it tries to put the brakes on rocketing public debt.
That said, on Ramaphosa’s watch and under his guidance, the coronavirus has hit us and is beyond the control of the authorities for the moment. Ministers have on the whole behaved very badly and government communications have been appalling. The ANC provinces simply didn’t prepare and he dare not hold their premiers to account because he depends on their support in the party. And unless he can create the political space for his finance minister to make a convincing attack on our debt, the markets (which already believe he cannot) will punish us.
That punishment will come in the form of ever-increasing interest payments on the money we borrow. That will soon total R4-trillion, most of it in rands for the moment. The Treasury is raising around R15bn a week, and if and when the time comes that we can’t pay it back and we go into default, the ANC’s ride comes to an end. Or at least that bit where it retained a modicum of self-respect and independence.
Long before that, though, the ANC will go into a party election at the end of 2022 and a general election in 2024 with virus-assisted unemployment at indescribable levels. What happens to Ramaphosa is impossible to tell. He wants a second term and there is no candidate openly moving against him at the moment and, as 2017 showed, this thing takes money. So he will probably get a second term no matter how poor the economy and no matter how little is done to stop corruption in the party and the civil service.
What happens in a general election is already beginning to take shape. The DA has shed support to the left and right and interim leader John Steenhuisen has made getting back white centre-right voters a priority. That’s at least what it looks like to me.
That leaves a surely rapidly increasing black middle class and political centre looking for a new home as Ramaphosa continues to disappoint. Will the DA walk away from them? If not, how does it plan to attract them? There’s tension in the party at the moment as Steenhuisen is being challenged by a young pretender, Mbali Ntuli, for the leadership, and as much as people try to denigrate her, hers is an authentic and appropriate candidacy. She hasn’t been parachuted into the party like Mmusi Maimane was. She’s done the hard yards for the DA in parts of KwaZulu-Natal, some of the most dangerous political territory in the world, let alone SA, for years now.
DA federal council chair and former leader Helen Zille continues to stir up trouble for herself and the party and she, too, is being challenged for her job, this time by the steady old political hand of Mike Moriarty in Gauteng. His is also a thoroughly authentic candidacy. Zille and Steenhuisen, arguably way out in front anyway, are in a hurry to get an election done online, but I think they should wait and get it right in three dimensions at a proper conference. The time will come.
Waiting in the wings now is the increasingly visible, or perhaps audible, presence of former DA mayor of Joburg Herman Mashaba and his soon-to-be-formed party, The People’s Dialogue. He left the DA with a host of experienced DA political managers behind him and if the DA doesn’t take him seriously he will do it serious damage in Gauteng. If the DA and Mashaba were to learn to work together, however, they could possibly challenge the ANC in some provinces come 2024.
That’s a story for another day, though.
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