It was all over Facebook. All my friends were sharing calls to go to a #Zumamustfall event in the Company Gardens on December 16.
So we went. Partly because we could. Our son has gone away for the December holidays, leaving us light in the obligation department. Partly because we are cross with the state of the country. And partly because we were curious.
When we got there, I was happy to take photographs and mail them back to the office (old journalism habits never die). I was happy to observe, happy to amble along with the people and their children and their dogs and their hats and their creative posters, their sunblock and their chilled Capetonian accents.
We peeled off when there was a move to march to the Fan Walk and quietly went home, mildly pleased with ourselves and our fellow protesters.
But it is not clear to me that anything was achieved.
My doubts come from a lifetime of cynicism about leadership and responsibility. It’s my view that humanity is divided into different groups of people: those who don’t want to take responsibility of any sort. That is, almost everybody. Then there’s a small group who always end up taking responsibility, even though they don’t like it much.
And then there’s another small group who see the gap, take the power and love it. They take the money, and the sexual partners (read “wives”, mostly), and the goats, and the chickens, and the nuclear submarines, and the power and the money.
The people who sat back and let others take the leadership then fall to complaining among themselves. Even if they have a nice leader, the kind that didn't really want to do it in the first place. If the leader is a bad one, then the complaining gets really loud. And it is clear to all that the solution is to find another leader.
This dynamic plays itself out in church groups and workplaces and school parenting forums. And is writ large in political life.
Use this then to look at the state of power in South Africa.
Picture a revolutionary movement that thought it wanted the power, to change things for the better. Astoundingly, against all the forces of history, it managed to gain power without the country having been ravaged beyond recognition.
It took power, with a leader of responsibility and integrity. Surprise! He stepped down. They took the next man in the succession. Surprise! He was way cleverer than everyone else and had some pretty strange ideas. Get rid of him then. Surprise! There was a giggling shark waiting in the wings. Who had been doing politics and money and patronage for a long time, and then proceeded to demonstrate how very good he was at that.
Dang! Maybe he wasn’t what we wanted, after all. But he has us, comrades, by the short and curlies.
There are undoubtedly more complex things at play in the ANC, but looked as a simple question of leadership, a question arises that bears some thinking about. It's clear that Zuma is a very bad leader. But who do we imagine is going to step into the breach? Someone nice? Someone who loves us all and is going to do the hard work while we complain comfortably among ourselves?
I think we may find that a political party that is plainly immature, and riven by patriarchy and tribalism and patronage and factionalism, may be ripe for the taking by someone worse than Jacob Zuma.
So, on that march, I found myself unable to chant #Zumamustfall.
Actually, I thought, we need something a little less catchy: #ANCmustchange. Simply put, they have shown themselves unable to put in place the checks and balances necessary to stop the hard-eyed power hungry men from taking over.
So fellow wielders of sunblock, pleasant as that march was, it won’t do the job. Either we have to join the ANC and change it from within. Or we have to put all of our energies into voting them out of power. Jacob Zuma is the least of our worries. It’s the shady men waiting in the wings we ought to be watching.
IOL
@reneemoodie
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