Ag siestog, Julius
Ag siestog, Julius. It seems that like so many demagogues before you, you’ve been hoist with your own petard. You certainly did have your uses in the lead up to, and for a time after Polokwane 2007, but as your self-perception of your political relevance outgrew what capital you had garnered by your slavish support of the Zuma-led coalition of the wounded, you became a threat to the great man’s plans for a second term, and so you had to go.
Having been the Pres’ MiniMe up to that point, articulating like a virtual clone of the great man, precisely what he wanted you to articulate, you became too big for your boots, and began to have thoughts of your own, andto actually express those thoughts out loud.
Having said that, your rantings about nationalisation contrary to popular belief, were not the product of your own genius. Rather, they served the very useful purpose of placing the issue of nationalisation squarely on the national table, so that the ANC could legitimately investigate it.
You might have noted that about the time your political death knell sounded on Saturday (the upholding of your convention and sentence by the ANC’s national disciplinary committee on all but one charge), the ANC’s nationalisation task team report coincidentally leaked to the media, revealing its principal conclusion: nationalisation is just not right for South Africa.
The contradictory mutterings of Gwede Mantashe notwithstanding, nationalisation is firmly off the table, according to statements by both mineral resources minister Susan Shabangu, and planning super-minister Trevor Manuel at the Mining Indaba last week Tuesday. (Well, for the time being at any rate. Who knows what will happen after MacDaddy Zuma completes his second term in office and his successor takes the hot seat?).
So you see, Julius, like all good MiniMe’s you had completed the task set for you: articulating what the boss man couldn’t articulate himself, but instead of waiting quietly for your next assignment, you decided to develop a mind of your own, and for that, you have paid the ultimate price. Other than being a surrogate for the variety of political hot potatoes that you were manipulated into handling, some more ineptly than others, you did serve a useful purpose for society at large. You held up a mirror into which the ANC was forced to look, and part of the reason for your downfall, is that the ANC did not like what it saw in that mirror.
Just how long do you think you could go on reminding the ANC publicly that it had supervised a net decline in employment during its tenure, that despite apparently Herculean efforts over the last 17 years, the rate of unemployment is higher today, than it was prior to 1994? And the whole plight of the poor thing as well.
In similar vein to the unemployment debate, the ANC is painfully aware that despite the great strides it has made in bringing electricity, running water, and housing to many millions of people, the incidence of shack dwelling in informal settlements remains stubbornly on the rise.
Rubbing the noses of the party bosses in these bleak realities as publicly as you did, did little to lay the foundations for a solid and meaningful political future for you. (The disgraceful example that you have set, with your arrogant conspicuous consumption which jars so discordantly with your championing of the cause of the poor, is a debate for another day.)
But nature abhors a vacuum, and until the ANC closes out the political space that it has inadvertently created which fosters the birth and growth of demagogues like you, somebody else will emerge to take your spot. If we’re lucky, it’ll be somebody who is genuinely concerned with the plight of the youth, the poor, and our unemployment rate, rather than another freeloader, who uses these challenges like political bludgeons to further their own interests, but I won’t be holding my breath.All that remains to be seen is precisely who the new MiniMe will be.
Written by Norman McFarlane You are reading Ag siestog, Julius articles
