The political jostling has begun and you know what that means. Everything said and done by politicians over the next eight months, must sadly be filtered through a bag of salt.
It is going to be the best and the worst of times. Altruism will be high on the agenda of every politician keen to keep what has become the best employment on earth, with the most job security and the best perks.
This is of course a very good thing for the rest of us, because politicians are likely to be on their very best behaviour.
There will be food parcels aplenty; homes will get handed over to people who have been waiting for years; rural communities will get taps; corruption will be at an all-time low and service delivery will generally see a huge uptick.
Cyril Ramaphosa has already made promises to that effect, vowing to accelerate the economy through a focus on service delivery and infrastructure. But note that he is speaking as president of the ANC first and the country second.
But it’s obvious that the reinvigorated thorn in the party’s bruised side is none other than it’s former No.1 Jacob Zuma, having taken an antagonistic position that threatens to split open yet another rift in the ruling party.
It goes without saying that the man has single-handedly weakened what was once the biggest revolutionary organisation on the continent.
He is credited with having caused the formation of the EFF and gave his blessings to the formation of the African Transformation Movement, both of which weakened the ANC at the polls.
Now he is becoming the face of the newly-formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) Party, which has made no secret of the fact that it wants him as its candidate president. And considering Zuma’s support in KZN, the MK Party is likely to erode the ANC’s shaky support base there even further.
Ironically, Zuma does this all in his supposed pursuit to revitalise the ANC and restore its heart and soul.
But Zuma isn’t stopping there. He is even threatening to tear apart the powerful SA National Civics Organisation (Sanco), which has always campaigned to keep the ANC in power.
Zuma has put them in a difficult position, because as Sanco’s KZN chairman, he is openly endorsing the MK Party, which will undermine Sanco’s work and its critical partnership with the ANC, which Zuma is technically still a member of.
The man is playing a dangerous game in a politically- explosive province where differences often have fatal outcomes that cause tensions in entire communities.
And this, a man who until very recently was too frail and sickly to serve out his full prison sentence.
These are the sort of games we must be on the lookout for. Take Ramaphosa’s promises, for example.
It came just days after the ANC’s Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula was so desperate to discredit Zuma, that he implicated ANC MPs in lying to parliament under oath about Zuma’s notorious Nkandla “fire pool.”
It’s a monumental, blundering – one that could lead to a massive loss of support for the ANC at the polls this year, all of which will be its own doing.
This period is what I like to compare to the final panel interview that job applicants sometimes have to go through.
Usually three or five stern-looking company executives grill each nervous hopeful by bombarding them with tricky questions, like “why do you believe you deserve this job?” and “what unique qualities do you possess that will benefit the company?”
Oh how I wish we could put the politicians through the same process.
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