By Benedict Xolani Dube
Dante Alighieri says “the path to paradise begins in hell.” Wasn’t it a wonderful start to 2018 Jacob Zuma was no more than a horrible, festering memory as Cyril Ramaphosa rode to our rescue. The ANC 101 Veterans garbed in a dishdasha of sham morality and ethics deceitfully led people to sing “Hosanna in the highest heaven”. The Pharisees concocted a gospel crusade that Cyril is the Messiah.
He will deliver salvation. The New Deal became the doctrine of the New Dawn. COSATU and the SACP, precisely as they did with Zuma, collapsed in a sobbing heap at the feet of Cyril. The deluded people prostrated themselves in his path.. Yes, the New Dawn has arrived. The thievery of the ANC was behind us. As St Julian of Norwich, the first published feminist martyr, observed back in 1395 “It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.
The thieving rotters would be exposed, the ill gotten gains confiscated and their sorry carcasses thrown into jail to rot.
A well-rehearsed orchestra of falsehood, tuned in a chorus of fork tongue, was unbridled with references to Cyril as Nelson Mandela’s reincarnation. A raging hysteria reverberated throughout the country as people sang “Zizojika’Izinto”.
Class consciousness citizens decoded its covert meaning. It signified a turn to eat for Zuma’s political victims, arch- enemies, professional backstabbers and comprador bourgeoisie.
In turn, the Minerals Energy Complex (MEC) ripped off its veil, unprecedentedly and overtly campaigning for Cyril as its preferred ANC presidential candidate. Oligarchy representatives stormed the Orlando East Community Hall in Soweto, chaperoned by Cyril and Parks Tau. True to form, the R25 ANC card-carrying members ululated.
The hall filled with nostalgic struggle songs and polemic slogans. ANC members, consumed by excitement of free t-shirts and food, once again allowed the ruling elite to impose its economic manifesto upon the ANC.
Ramaphosa unveiled a “New Deal” under the hawk-eyes of Stephen Koseff, former Chief Executive Officer of Investec Group, First Rand’s Johan Burger and Goldman Sachs’ Colin Coleman. The hall was filled with the omnipresence of Nicholas F. Oppenheimer and Ivan Glasenberg, Chief Executive Officer of Glencore. Objectively, going through the plan with a fine toothcomb, one discerns Tito’s Economic Manifesto as the New Deal. It is a concoction of voodoo economics that fuses Thatcherism and Reaganomics: a thorough- going classic neoliberal, socio-economic policy.
The top six results of the 54th ANC Conference (otherwise known as the valley of nothingness) was a well thought through conspiracy in the history of ANC politics. The valley of nothingness became another never ending proxy battle between SA’s historical oligarchy and other external forces challenging South Africa’s status quo. Cyril’s election solidified and fortified the homogeneous power of the white oligarchy. The historical objectives of ANC were to be locked in a mirage.
Consequently, all economic resolutions adopted in that valley of nothingness, like others, are stockpiled in the dungeon of doom at Luthuli House. The historically dispossessed shall continue to be the exploited refugees under the terrifying dictatorship of Minerals Energy Complex.
Cyril is an embodiment of South Africa’s 1994 Faustian Pact, which Patrick Bond refers to as an ‘Elite Transition’. Ramaphosa is the cotton thread woven into the tapestry of this 1994 Faustian Pact. He is the guard to keep SA as apartheid Panopticon prison where hopes of dehumanized are locked in a solitary confinement. Moreover, the MEC has groomed and mentored him to be the Judas goat.
A Judas Goat is a ‘trained goat which is used in animal herding. It is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them into the slaughterhouse while its own life is spared.’ Ideologically, a Judas goat is akin to the comprador
bourgeoisie that Mao Tse Tung describes as ‘...a running dog of imperialism...and a target of the revolution.’
Allegations against Cyril pertaining to the Marikana Massacre have crystallized the role of this comprador-bourgeoisie. He gave credence to those allegations.
In the voice of Chief Nanga, the main character in a satirical piece by Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, Cyril in thunderous voice shouts: “Mama, you are gone now. We were still supposed to do a lot of things together. I am going to go to Marikana without you, but I will be guided by your spirit...” Consistent with his stony heart, he threw dust in the mourners’ eyes. The victims of Black government brutality still hang on hope. An apology is not forthcoming. The silence of the ANC 101 Veterans is deafening. The crusade to restore a moral, ethical and empathic ANC leadership was a theatrical gimmick. Hence, the ANC 101 Veterans are not demanding Cyril to honour his commitment to the victims of Marikana.
Paraphrasing William Shakespeare: ‘God hath given Cyril Ramaphosa one face and he make himself another for South Africans especially for the Africans.’ The Janus-faced nature of Cyril Ramaphosa is captured by Earl Love, a Trinidadian novelist, in the prologue of his book, The Dragon Can’t Dance, when he tells of a leader that instructed his followers: “Crucify me!
Let me die for my people. Stone me with stones as you stone Jesus, I will love you still.’ And when they start to stone him in truth he gets vex and start to cuss: ‘Get me down Get me down!’ he says. ‘Let every sinner man bear his own blasted burden; who is I to die for people who ain’t have sense enough to know that they can’t pelt a man with big stones when so much little pebbles lying on the ground.’” What type of a Messiah is Cyril? Why aren’t he and his swindlers being pelted with big stones of truth? Chief Albert Luthuli taught us all that salvation is through the cross. Cyril must comprehend the holistic task of carrying the cross on behalf of South Africans.
Let us cast our minds back to Heather Hughes’ premonition, in her book First President: A Life of John Dube, Founding President of the ANC, when she quotes John Dube saying: “Where there was once a pool, water will collect again.” In the twinkle of an eye, SA has been engulfed by Cyril’s coup d'œil dark side. We are submerged in CR17 conference payments, Cyril’s business relations with BOSASA and a skewed politics of energy. State Institutions are still weapons of ANC factionalism and the ANC is miring South Africa into scenes straight out of George Orwells’ Animal Farm. Others are extremely more equal than others.
Pragmatism prevails among South Africans who are now used to deducing truth from facts. This is the cardinal principle of science which lies at the heart of materialist dialectics. They know that the past twenty-five years of shameful pitfalls is stewed in the three-legged pot of a SACP, COSATU and ANC alliance.
Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s literary folktale “The Emperor’ New Clothes”, South Africans are shouting louder and bolder, ‘But he (Cyril) isn’t wearing anything at all’.
The media, the crooked-spine middle class, the Minerals Energy Complex (SA ruling elite), ANC 101 Veterans and ‘Cyril’s dogs of war’ and all those who have erected a fortress around Cyril are beginning to lose face. People are questioning his invisible garb. The Germans have a saying: "Lügen haben kurze Beine", meaning ‘lies don't make it very far’. Ordinary citizens have chiselled to the ground Cyril, the Ozymandias of false moral and ethical leadership. He is a failed leader, feasting on the hot air of rhetoric that ‘we shall confiscate all the ill-gotten gains and throw their sorry carcasses into jail to rot’.
The Great Expectations of the New Dawn have developed into a phantom pregnancy. People are weeping for the beloved country that is being turned into a Land that God Made in Anger, while Cyril’s swindlers are anointing themselves as society’s future villains. In compartmentalizing and stigmatizing those citizens who respect Edward Said’s counsel of speaking truth to power, he has labelled them as fight-back regiments, disingenuous and unpatriotic.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan intellectual and writer who refused to be silenced said, “Certain people told me that this story was too disgraceful too shameful, that it should be concealed.... There were others who claimed that it was a matter for tears and sorrow, that it should be suppressed so that we should not shed tears a second time. I asked them: How can we cover up pits in our courtyard with leaves or grass, saying to ourselves that because our eyes cannot now see the holes, our children can prance about the yard as they like? Happy is the man who is able to discern the pitfalls in his path for he can avoid them.” South Africa dare not bend the truth even if we must perish.
Cyril is ‘President’ of an organization whose post-apartheid legacy is archived in the Zondo Commission, the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) Commission of Inquiry, Nuget Commission of Inquiry into Tax Administration and Governance by SARS and Mokgoro Commission of Inquiry. Evidently, the ANC is an incubator of scoundrels. A den of ossified soiled souls.
Professor Ben Okri, poet, novelist and one of the foremost African writers in the post-modern and post-colonial tradition has written: “African nations started in dreams, became overwhelmed by reality and stumbled upon a nightmare....Africa has surely made enough mistakes for us to learn from....greater the mistakes, greater the lessons to learn from...It is now how things are that counts, it is what you do with them....” Agreeing with Ngugi, Okri outlines the immaculateness of an African dream which is exterminated by our failure to be frank and honest when confronting societal ills.
South Africans dare not bury their heads in the sand while the future of the next generation and the prosperity of this country are being devoured. Cyril is no Messiah: he is from the same institution that gave us Zuma, Malema and all the others who continue to swallow up the finite resources of our country meant for future generations.
South African subalterns must answer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question “Can the Subaltern Speak” Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction could be answer. The mythical ANC must be destroyed and the foundations of the 1994 Faustian Pact shall fall. Cyril the thread keeps this pact alive must be pelted with stones until he reaches Calvary. In the meantime, a new man and a new nation must rise for the sake of the next generation. Or else all of us collectively shall perish. However, we can take comfort in Dante Alighieri’s words: “The Subaltern, meaning ‘of inferior rank’, is a term adopted by Antonio Gramsci to refer to those groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling class. Subaltern classes may include peasants, workers and other groups denied access to hegemonic power. -The path to paradise begins in hell.” Let us go through hell!
Benedict Xolani Dube is a political scientist with the Xubera Institute for research and Development