They grow up so fast, these presidents. One day they’re listening spellbound to fairy tales such as The New Dawn or anxiously sounding out the words as they read Goldishocks and the Three Bearish Ratings Agencies, the next they’re getting ready for their first vote of no confidence.
For Cyril Ramaphosa, Thursday’s vote is mostly symbolic, a rite of passage announcing to the world that he has put aside the things of a child and is ready to be draped in the gravy-blotched, flyblown mantle of state, and to lift the sceptre of power, and then to be told that it’s not really a sceptre, it’s just a length of pipe that fell out of the ceiling, but it’s cool if he wants to keep it and pretend it’s a sceptre because it means Patricia de Lille can announce a tender to have it replaced, and that means Christmas has come early for the comrades over at Azania Logistics, a pipe-supplying business founded in, well, gosh, it looks as if they were founded four minutes before that pipe fell out of the ceiling.
Still, there will be some nerves. Jacob Zuma might have survived seven votes of no confidence, but Ramaphosa will have been advised that Zuma’s strategy might not work for him, mostly because the ANC can’t afford lube any more, which means he’s unlikely to be mobbed by the same writhing, wriggling mass of ANC lickspittles who threw themselves at Zuma and formed an impenetrable wall of complicity and hypocrisy around him.
At best, Ramaphosa can expect his MPs to shuffle grudgingly into line, like grade 4s who thought they were going to Disney World, but who, on a closer reading of the memo, have discovered they will be spending the day at Di’s Knee World, a small museum dedicated to the art and science of knee replacements, run by a retired but still very enthusiastic orthopaedic surgeon named Dianne.
There’s also the fact that, deep down, Ramaphosa knows it’s true.
In SA, a vote of no confidence in the ANC’s leadership isn’t an accusation. It’s a statement of immutable fact. Nobody has confidence in the ANC or Ramaphosa, least of all, I suspect, Ramaphosa. Even now he is probably staring gloomily at the first line of his rebuttal, crossed out and rewritten four times: “I mean, yes, to be fair, you’re not wrong ... ”
Luckily for Ramaphosa, however, Thursday’s vote isn’t really about him.
It is, instead, the political equivalent of a sex tape; a grubby lunge for the national spotlight by the African Transformation Movement (ATM), whereby a party with fewer voters than the population of Makana in the Eastern Cape gets its sales pitch heard by the entire country.
At least, that’s what it looks like on the surface. When the ATM was formed, rumours swirled that it was a surrogate for the Zupta faction. If you believed those rumours, Thursday’s vote might look ominously like an invitation to Zuma’s backers in the ANC to hand Ramaphosa a public humiliation.
It’s possible, of course, but once you go down this path of speculation you have to be open to other outcomes.
For example, if you believe the ATM is a rent-a-crowd that will do anything for the right price, you must be open to the possibility that Ramaphosa has outbid the Zuptas and that Thursday’s vote is a handy way of forcing his opponents into a very visible display of support.
But all of this is conjecture. Without evidence that there are Machiavellian shenanigans afoot, one has to assume that Thursday’s vote is simply a rather cunning force-multiplier for the ATM, decorated with some good old-fashioned political posturing.
This is not to say the ATM’s list of gripes doesn’t include a few sensible questions. Ramaphosa has been a better president than Zuma, but a stale samoosa being fought over by two seagulls would be a better president than Zuma. It is healthy to interrogate the president and to light fires under the ruling party.
But when those fires are the sulphurous blazes of hell and damnation, we should pause. And when a religious party such as the ATM demands a referendum on the death penalty, I’m afraid we’re deep into the realms of populism, fantasy and, at least where capital punishment is concerned, supreme cowardice.
After all, if you believe that God is the ultimate judge, then hanging someone isn’t justice. All you’re doing is transporting them to court. The ATM’s leadership wants people to be executed, but refuses to accept responsibility for that final judgment, offloading it instead onto a judge nobody has heard from in 2,000 years.
Now, however, it’s time for more earthly matters, as Ramaphosa walks solemnly towards his first vote of no confidence; the first, I’m sure, of many.
Yes indeed, they grow up so fast.
