President Zuma was inconsequential in the drama originally written with him as the star, says William Saunderson-Meyer.
It was the best and worst of South African political discourse. It was the raw hope of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison exactly 25 years ago this week, reduced to squabbling comedy.
It was the magisterial chair of the National Chamber of Provinces versus the classroom monitor pettiness of the Speaker of the National Assembly. It was the froth and spittle of the EFF versus the calm rationality of the DA. It was juvenile low-fives and catcalls from the governing party benches versus the outraged eloquence of IFP veteran Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
And then there was Jacob Zuma, president of the Republic of South Africa, the most powerful nation on the continent, reduced to an inconsequential walk-on role in the drama originally written with him as the star. He could not even keep his own supporters awake, with a number of ANC MPs snoring gently throughout his lacklustre performance.
The State of the Nation Address was disastrous. Zuma was reduced to a shuffling, lip-smacking, giggling caricature, spouting platitudes and painfully sounding his way past the three-syllable words like a lazy schoolboy who hadn’t done his preparation, called upon to read aloud in class.
There was nary an original thought or felicitous phrase to be found in the long ordeal. The pedestrian and tired compilation of “good story to tell” factoids appeared not even to engage the president.
Aside from the occasional curiously high-pitched chortle that is his nervous trademark, Zuma seemed drawn and glum. He has much to be glum about.
Already the president has curtailed his presence at large public gatherings, his minders trying as best possible to ensure that he is not humiliated by booing.
Now he cannot even deliver the most important address in the parliamentary calendar without it degenerating into a raucous circus, increasingly kept in control not by conventions of constitutional democracy but by armed policemen in the Assembly and the state’s jamming of cellphones, so that his embarrassment is not the instant fodder of the world’s social media.
To try to stage-manage inconvenient realities is a malignant distortion of the purpose of Parliament as the chamber where the voice of the people can be heard. While it is true that sometimes the people’s voice, as articulated by a crass EFF, is rude and peremptory, it is foolish to pretend that the question, “When are you going to pay back the money?” spent by the state on Zuma’s private home, does not resonate across the land.
While the EFF MPs were bodily evicted and the president chortled gleefully, the parliamentary channel switched off sound and resolutely focused on the presiding officers. This happened at several points of the proceedings – some poor controller sitting in a booth trying desperately to gauge with split-second accuracy whether an intervention was disruptive (mute) or a legitimate motion (audio, please) – so that the address was at times like watching a show in mime.
We, too, as a nation in crisis should be equally glum, when the shameful ongoing xenophobic violence against foreign shop-owners in the townships elicited not a mention, never mind condemnation.
The sitting was attended by a high-powered AU presence in recognition of which the best Zuma could do was promise that all South African schoolchildren would learn the AU anthem by Africa Month in May.
The strangest thing about the address and the Zuma government is the bizarre pretence that all is fine and dandy in the land. There is a pathological inability to admit that there is any problem at all.
Although the president devoted a lengthy part of his address to Eskom, it was never to get to grips with the fact that the economy is being brought to its knees. Instead, it was to recite avuncular but empty reassurances, like a physician who is unable to diagnose, never mind treat, a dread disease but hopes to placate the unfortunate victim with as cheery a demeanour as possible,
By raising expectations of the address – lots of government hype, with calls on the citizenry to submit their suggestions on content but in the end delivering little – Zuma may have fallen into the trap that snared PW Botha in 1985. He and his advisers put out the word that in a speech at Durban City Hall he would “cross the Rubicon”, at a stroke jettisoning apartheid.
It did not happen. The rand plummeted. Discontent flared into low-grade insurrection. A few years later, PW was history.
* William Saunderson-Meyer’s column The Jaundiced Eye appears in Independent Media’s Saturday publications.
** Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye
*** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.