The Day The ANC Died

Someday, in the rapidly approaching future, an historic national election will take place. An overwhelming number of loyal ANC supporters, apparently sickened by one petty scandal too many, will vote for a rival political party or simply not vote at all. Once the votes have been tallied the ANC will lose power. After the fatal count, a plethora of excited, stunned and devastated political experts will speak of this historic vote as the day the ANC died. But they’ll be wrong. The ANC died a long time before this election took place; it died on the 9th  February 2017. The formal electoral ejection of the ANC from the governing seats of power was merely the moment the still twitching, long rotting corpse of the ANC finally stopped moving. 

Time for a small football analogy.  Let’s say you’re a Manchester United fan (and there’s a good chance you are); when you’re watching your grossly underperforming team score a great last minute goal your gaze is naturally on the ball as it goes into the net. Invariably it’s the team’s spectacularly well-paid striker who applies the finishing touch. And you rightfully cheer his name at the top of your voice.  It’s only on playback, when you notice how many other people (the suspiciously bilingual goal-keeper, the injury prone wingback, the arthritic holding midfielder and the eagle-eyed number Ten who flicked the ball over two giant defenders onto the head of the bewilderingly stationary striker) all played a major part in the goal. You realize (philosophically and materially speaking) that the goal effectively began the moment Man U’s goalkeeper prevented a certain goal, flung the ball out to the defensively weak wingback who hoofed the ball to the overweight holding midfielder— and so on – and, since you’re a fair person, you graciously give the entire team their due credit. 

Your wise opinion is quickly backed up the following day when the losing team’s manger sits his collection of underperforming idiots down to watch the shitty, undeserved last-minute goal. The manager calmly explains to his assembled dolts that the goal isn’t the result of the pony-tailed striker belting the leather into the back of the net; the goal didn’t last for the 1.3 seconds the ball took to travel from the striker’s coveted boots to the back of the net. The goal lasted for the entire twenty-three seconds that Manchester United needed to move the ball from the goalkeeper’s gloves to the boot of their striker and into the net; Time and Perception and all that.

Back to the ANC. The death of the ANC will not occur, as most of the pundits will declare, when it tastes its first electoral defeat. No, the ANC died back in time on Thursday 9 February 2017 when President Zuma ordered the South African army to guard the streets during his State of the Nation address. The fatigued South African electorate was so dejected by the daily corruption about them, so utterly worn out by keeping an accurate count of the government’s endless stream of own goals, they didn’t hear the ANC’s long, croaky death rasp rattle around its throat and missed the signs. 

Signs are everything are they not? A natural human death is marked by a sustained reduction of appetite, a reduction of physical and mental interaction and the failure of essential internal organs.  There must be lots of interesting academic markers for indicating the death of a democratically elected government such as institutional collapse and the movement of a democracy to an authoritarian state. When looking for signs of the death of any government as a functioning organ of democracy, the act of a sitting president sending the military onto the streets to subjugate the movement and free expression of the very people who elected it, must be high on the list; it is the equivalent of heart stoppage or brain failure.

Why has the ANC not already been officially declared dead? Despite not lifting a finger or asking for any water or food for years, the ANC’s corpse is locked away in an exclusive private hospital room and hooked up to a multi-purpose life support machine (paid for by funds from the Mandela Children’s Fund). Several concerned relatives are permanently stationed around the bed holding up the ANC’s corpse. They have nothing better to do but fight daily over the many billions left to them in the ANC’s will.

Come what may these family members will continue to ignore the evidence of the MRI machine that shows no sign of brain activity until they’ve gotten hold of their rightful inheritance.