It was a year in which everything we valued as a young nation imploded before our eyes, writes Tinyiko Maluleke.
The year 2016 came at us like a burglar in the night. Amid the outrage unleashed by Penny Sparrow’s postings about the hordes of “monkeys” swarming the Durban beaches, we limped on to the new year. That was just after we were saved from Des van Rooyen and his “weekend-special” appointment as minister of finance. He whose tenure was meant to proceed with built-in financial advisers from the word go.
We burst into the year with a heightened awareness of the fact that every little thing we valued as a young nation, every sacred symbol, every solemn oath, every single layer of national integrity, every treasured memory of the way we once were, each and every one of our founding myths and shibboleths - all of these things - could implode before our very eyes, if this was not happening already.
Soon enough, we knuckled down to the one activity that has come to define us, namely protest. Protest is an act we can perform with our eyes closed, the tactic we have invoked again and again since the so-called “great Xhosa cattle killing” of 1856.
Protest, overt and covert, public and hidden, strategic and tactical, is after all, the historic weapon of the weak in the face of the superior armoury of the powerful.
But sometimes the arrows of protest turn inwards, ravaging the battered souls of the downtrodden, as they wound deep into themselves and their own, with each foray threatening to cut themselves adrift, into a state of moral wilderness.
Among our 2016 opening gambits were #OutsourcingMustFall and #Shackville at UCT.
Then came the Vuwani massacre of schools and the wanton destruction of dreams. With the 2016 spring came a new wave of #FeesMustFall, anchored around the call for free, quality and decolonised education.
In many of these protests, symbols of the state were regarded as legitimate targets for vilification and destruction.
But should these include libraries, lecture halls, schools and even clinics? In the face of these protests, many universities, supported by the state, reached for their modern knobkieries, stun grenades, rubber bullets, Tasers, pepper sprays and security cameras. While easy to justify under the protest conditions that prevailed, a security response, in and of itself, is not morally superior to the tactics of those intent on burning and disrupting.
Nor can it ever be a permanent solution.
For all their skills and for all our need for visible police presence in our dangerously unequal society, running universities and managing students are not skills security personnel are either equipped or famous for.
We need to come to terms with the extent to which we have been psychologically brutalised so that violence has become our most potent medium of communication and self-expression.
A similar propensity to violence is at play when in the name of faith, dubious pastors repeatedly and with impunity, blackmail their congregants into imbibing petrol and Dettol, into nibbling at live rodents, also commanding them to close their eyes and spray (insecticides such as Doom into their own faces).
The violence notwithstanding, the Fallists seem to be calling for an overhaul and a total reimagination of the higher education system, for the better.
We need a tripartite higher education roadmap involving the government, university management and students. Such a roadmap would include a shared statement about where we wish to take higher education, what can and cannot be done immediately, a clear action plan with timelines and a solemn commitment by the government to follow the process through.
In any other country, the scenarios we have painted above would be regarded as a national crisis. Not in President Jacob Zuma’s Mzansi.
Zuma has the proven ability to manufacture scandals and crises, parallel to and in spite of the daily miseries of South Africans.
Such daily miseries include the scourge of rape, ongoing homophobic violence of the kind that saw 22-year-old Noluvo Swelindawo of Driftsands, near Khayelitsha, abducted and brutally murdered a week ago, racist incidences of the kind that saw Victor Rethabile Mlotshwa being stuffed alive into a coffin, and the effects of grinding poverty that saw 3-year-old Everlate Chauke drown as she slipped between the fingers of her father, as he hung on for dear life, when floods hit her squatter camp home by the river Jukskei, outside Johannesburg.
Consider how, behind the backs of the #FeesMustFall protesters, an astonishing project to bully the minister of finance out of office was hatched and brazenly executed.
Apparently, the “higher purpose” of this project was to take over the Treasury and redirect its resources towards black economic empowerment, Gangnam style I mean, Nkandla style.
When the Constitutional Court ruled that both Zuma and Parliament had acted in a manner inconsistent with the constitution in their handling of the public protector’s Secure in Comfort report, a national sigh of relief was heard from Musina all the way down to Hout Bay.
Then came what Sipho Pityana, in his speech at Reverend Stofile’s, funeral termed a “cataclysmic anti-climax”.
In a subsequent address to the nation, on April Fools Day, Zuma said everything except utter the words “I hereby resign”.
On that day, suggested Sipho Pityana, the nation was thrust into “grotesque and unmitigated chaos”.
We then moved into the chaos of the local elections upset that saw the DA and the EFF forming coalition governments in Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg and Tshwane.
For violating his oath of office as president, Zuma said sorry and moved on nonchalantly. For the loss of support in the elections, the ANC took collective responsibility, otherwise known as no responsibility.
And on we marched to the next stage of chaos, as Zuma dubbed public protector Thuli Madonsela’s State of Capture report, a “funny report”. Eish, but that funny report has kept Zuma busy, hey. First, assisted by who else but Ministers Zwane and Van Rooyen, he tried to prevent it from being published.
Then they gave up. Then Zuma took the report, especially its remedial actions, on review, praying that it would be set aside.
If Zuma were to succeed in this quest, it would be a rare legal victory for him in recent years.
But if he succeeds only in asserting his right, as state president, to appoint the judicial commission of inquiry, it would be a pyrrhic victory, for the public would still have their commission of inquiry.
Both ways, the public protector has already succeeded in sharing her findings, however tentative, with the public.
No court ruling can cause the public to un-know what they already know, anymore than the Zuma rape acquittal of 2006 has caused people to forget about the shower and the washing of hands after the peeling of an onion! Nor can South Africa forget “Khwezi” Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, even if we tried. And boy, haven’t we tried!
Recently, our national flirtation with chaos took a dramatic turn, when we narrowly escaped economic junk status, and also a motion of no confidence by national executive committee (NEC) of the ANC.
This is unheard of in Zuma’s nine-year reign. As an experienced shepherd would marshal a herd of cattle on the rural plains of a village in Lusikisiki, so has Jacob Zuma marshalled the NEC, the ANC parliamentary caucus, the cabinet and the alliance partners.
The NEC vote of no confidence never had a chance in hell.
Like the rest of the ANC, the ANC top six appear hypnotised by Zuma’s political footwork.
None of them is likely to offer either the ANC or the country a real alternative.
Between Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and AU chairwoman and ANC presidency heir apparent, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, we are likely to see a continuation of the politics of the belly, albeit with a human face and with more sophistication.
To paraphrase a popular Negro Spiritual, will you help me sing: “I looked over Jordan and what did I see, coming for to carry me home?” But sorry folks, I see no sweet chariot, swinging low, coming forth to carry us home in 2017. I see more chaos ahead.
* Maluleke is a professor at the University of Pretoria and an extraordinary professor at Unisa. He writes in his personal capacity. Follow him on Twitter @ProfTinyiko
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.