In the short space of 23 years, South Africans appear to be sliding back to being the quintessential con-damned of the earth, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.
Selfish nation
Rape nation
Khwezi nation
Raped nation
Racist nation
Bad to be poor nation
With these words, Mark Heywood, executive director of SECTION27 and a member of the Treatment Action Campaign, opens his poem titled State of the Nation, 2017. In order to amplify and typify the state we are in and the kind of nation South Africa has become, Heywood ends each line in his poem with the word “nation”.
It is a disturbingly truthful poem. The only line missing is the line “damn nation”. And damn! We are turning out to be a truly wretched nation.
Instead of The Wretched of the Earth, the title of Frantz Fanon’s 1961 classic, originally written in French, Les Damnés de la Terre, it could have been translated more directly and more accurately into The Damned of the Earth.
“Damned” is the word that Fanon chose to capture in that book, the condition in which “natives” found themselves in the world.
In one of the most powerful prefaces to a book ever written, Jean-Paul Sartre noted that, at that time, the world consisted of humans on the one hand and natives on the other. “The former had the Word; the others had use of it,” noted Sartre with biting sarcasm.
On occasion of the Sona on Thursday evening, “damned” is the word that seems to epitomise what has become of our hallowed Parliament. “Damned” seems to accurately capture the moribund condition into which the glorious liberation movement, the ANC, is rapidly and furiously descending.
The South African state is in a state of damnation. In the short space of 23 years, South Africans appear to be sliding back to being the quintessential con-damned of the earth.
To protect myself, I adjusted my Sona expectations to low, very low. Having attended most of the nine previous Sonas he has delivered, I expected no fireworks from President Zuma.
Things could not get worse than the Sonas of 2015 and 2016, I said to myself. But I was wrong. No sooner had I thought those thoughts than I realised that I was trying too hard.
My weak-kneed optimism had already been contradicted by the unprecedented security measures, including the deployment of the largest contingent of soldiers to the parliamentary precinct since the dawn of democracy, the not-so-well attended EFF gathering in the streets and the unprecedented ANC Sona grand parade.
As well as the speech, the Sona was meant to be a stately occasion and a moment of national pride.
Instead, the 2017 Sona became a partisan moment, as each political party paraded their colours and narcissistically chanted their own names all the way from the streets right into Parliament.
The voice of the young imbongi was drowned out by the shouts of “ANC! ANC!” and “Tsotsi! Tsotsi!” as the president walked into the parliamentary chambers.
I cannot pretend that I was surprised when we had to endure the now-familiar parliamentary pranks and stunts before the president could deliver his speech. We have seen this movie before.
My prior Sona knowledge and experiences were not enough to prepare me for the level and nature of chaos that unfolded in Parliament on Thursday. The police in full riot fatigues, standing with their chests out at the doors of Parliament, were a sore sight to behold.
Each tactical blunder by the Honourable Madam Speaker and the chairperson of the NCOP, their blatantly inconsistent handling of the “points of order”, their irrational fear of allowing a moment of silence for the Esidimeni 94, the disastrous and over-the-top attempt to make an example of Cope’s Willie Madisha - each of these wrong moves stung like a red-hot arrow into my patriotic heart.
They allowed members of Parliament to use the F word. They presided over the blatant invocation of the race card.
They watched as MPs called each other dogs.
They sat there and allowed pepper spray to enter the parliamentary chambers. Then they authorised the fist fight and the banging of heads against the seats and the floor.
Though grossly unseemly and unbecoming, it is one thing for a fist fight to break out between MPs, it is another for the Speaker of Parliament and NCOP’s chairperson to authorise, facilitate and proactively trigger a brawl of the magnitude we saw.
Inadvertently, the pictures and video-clips of the white shirts carrying out their shameful acts, beamed across the land and within minutes across the world, presented us with the real state of the nation.
That moemish moment, my fellow compatriots, and not what Zuma said later, is the true state of our nation.
We are a leaderless nation marching confidently into the abyss.
With due respect to the organisation called Africa Check for their sterling in fact-checking Zuma’s 2017 Sona (their fact-checkers probably did not sleep on Thursday night, shem) but they have missed the point. The significance of Sona 2017 does not lie in the words of Zuma.
It lies in the sticks wielded by partisan crowds in the streets, the sjamboks that crackled in the air, the helmets from behind which the riot police looked at us, the barbed wire, the guns that shone brightly off the hips of the soldiers and the diligence with which the “white shirts” carried out their grisly mandate.
This is the state of our nation. As a country, we need a reality check, not a mere fact check of the words of Zuma.
So am I ignoring the 20-page- long text of the Sona speech Zuma delivered? Am I choosing to ignore its invocation of Oliver Reginald Tambo? No, I cannot ignore the text of arguably the most important speech given by our president annually - even if I tried.
And yet, after the developments that accompanied the 2017 Sona, the question that bugs me is: what more can the ANC do to help President Jacob Zuma command the minimum respect - inside and outside Parliament - necessary for him to carry out the responsibilities of his high office, and to do so without taking either the ANC or the country or both, down with him?
* Maluleke is a professor at the University of Pretoria and an extraordinary professor at Unisa. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.