Amid a recent outpouring of fawning, self-serving ubuntu and bogus brotherhood among sworn political enemies, let’s not forget that our politics is a dangerous business, and there’s good reason our political class spends billions on personal protection. On our tab, naturally.
Isn’t that why we had a political killings task team (PKTT) as an elite unit in the police force? That is, until Senzo Mchunu was left alone with pen and paper on New Year’s Eve 2024. Prying into the cesspool that is the ANC “at work”, where politics and crime coagulate, the PKTT ran fearless investigations from its HQ at the Oyster Box in Umhlanga Rocks, compiling a library of spicy dockets. Manfully sniffing fine cognacs in their private lounge, PKTT members may even have contemplated arresting some of the bad buggers, but seldom did.
Yet when our politicians meet each other in public you’d swear they were brothers separated at birth. No PKTT required here, thank you. It’s all insincere displays of exaggerated back-slapping (no back-stabbing in public), shoulder-bumping, “com and bigman”, and generally an abandonment of decorum designed to mislead the casual observer into mistaking it for actual human affection.
You’d never think that behind the scenes, revenge and plots and the exorcising of hatreds petty and small animate your public representatives. And below these nauseating displays of brotherly fraternity, another, silent layer of hoodlum enforces the dodgy contracts, collects the money, hides the evidence and generally covers up and does the dirty work for the huggers and shakers.
Nowhere was this resort to bogus brotherhood as a paid-up member of a self-adoring collective levitating above the common business of politics more evident than in former president Jacob Zuma’s gatecrashing of Julius Malema’s mourning rituals in Limpopo for his late aunt.
It’s all insincere displays of exaggerated back-slapping (no back-stabbing in public), shoulder-bumping, ‘com and bigman’
One is warned not to trust Greeks bearing gifts, but be on guard too for a Zulu with an agenda. Or a grudge. As if conjuring up a spirit, Zuma told Malema: “I’ve talked to uMkhonto we Sizwe, and there is no need for us to be separated by whites, absolutely no need. We need to come together, even if we have different organisations and views, but there must be a commitment that we stand together so we can liberate black people.” The orifice had spoken.
Fraternal, no doubt, though those less easily distracted by faux ubuntu might wonder whether Zuma isn’t going through another midlife crisis, and is now regretting his best years misspent masquerading as a nonracial democrat. And swearing to uphold the constitution, or perhaps just that part that lets him avoid justice by lodging limitless legal appeals at taxpayers’ expense.
So having gone through the motions of pretending to lead a constitutional democracy, Zuma in his dotage has reached a new conclusion: it’s whites that are the problem. Black people, according to Zuma, will remain “slaves forever” unless they are “in charge of this country in every way”.
Zuma’s own liberation from the cloying confines of the constitution, and even the Freedom Charter, has allowed him to give full vent to a wisdom born of decades of shirking and avoiding responsibility. He had almost two terms to give expression to his philosophy, but he’d sell the country out for a free carwash, and he’s still got the gall to raise spurious racist suspicion against an entire section of the population. None dare call it hate speech.
Nor are we to blink at his fellow-mourner Malema’s own personalised call for murder and mayhem, when he breaks into the chorus line of “Kill the Boer”. Hate speech? It’s history, bro!
It took some nifty footwork by Malema to defuse Zuma’s gruesome invitation to gang up on whites as a political strategy. “We belong to different political parties; we will never come together,” Malema declared later, “but when death occurs, we will always come together and show respect for each other, because it is the love for Africans.” Alas, his effusion of brotherly love only barely concealed the dagger he hid, when he said of Zuma that he is a “kind old man”.
One can hardly imagine Zuma succumbing to such barbed blandishment, and he must be regretting his little detour to Limpopo to bend a knee and appeal to the baser racial sentiments of our Juju. A waste of ubuntu!
Gone are the days when Malema was prepared to learn at the feet of the master, declaring himself willing to “kill for Zuma”, the second-highest expression of love for a friend, and a lesser-known variant of ubuntu, beneficial to all involved except the victim.
But rejecting Zuma should not be confused with going easy on whites. To prove his enduring grasp of the racial thorn in our politics, Malema had a go at Helen Zille’s “celebrating” Orlando Pirates’ win in the recent Soweto derby. “We reject Helen with a beer; we are not beer people!”
To which one can only say: give that man a Bells!
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