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For those who have heard this story before, please skip the first few paragraphs.
It concerns a former television reporter who covered the early 1990s negotiations spearheaded by the Congress for a Democratic SA.
Each time there was a minor or major breakthrough in the marathon talks, said reporter would stand in front of the camera and deliver his monologue.
When it was time to sign off, he would give the camera a stern yet meaningful stare and offer this great insight: “What will happen next, no one can tell. But one thing is for sure: South Africa will never be the same again.”
With those profound words, he would sign off, only to return with the same parting words whenever a breakthrough occurred.
This went on for years.
Eventually, in April 1994, South Africa was never the same again, and the viewers were forever spared the prediction.
I missed that reporter these past two weeks, when the country’s voters delivered an election that shocked, excited and terrified – depending where on the political spectrum you sat.
For us wordsmiths and for political sangomas, it has been fun. Nothing tickles us like the high drama that hit the national political front over the past fortnight.
For those at the centre of it all, it has thrown up new possibilities for the conduct of politics.
For the biggest loser – the governing party – it has presented a new opportunity for reinvention, because business as usual will be tantamount to a slow suicide.
For the ANC’s rivals, big and small, the opportunity is there to exercise power directly or indirectly.
And for citizens and organised societal players, the opportunity is open to them to learn to channel, in the best way possible, the unprecedented power that this fluid situation has given rise to.
The voters have told the political class that nobody is entitled to govern them, regardless of great legacies and epic past achievements. For too long the narrative in mainstream political speak has been about how much of South Africa the ANC should be governing, not whether it should be governing at all.
It was almost an anomaly that another party should wield power in a province or major city. So, the talk has been about when and how the ANC will get the Western Cape and Cape Town back – as if it is wrong for someone else to be in charge there.
Conversely, it was never envisaged that another political formation would ever get to run provincial and metro governments across the country. Such a thought was lunacy.
Hence the shock of the past two weeks and the scramble for power at all costs. Before now, it was inconceivable that anyone with serious political nous would suggest that the 2019 general election could see ANC stalwarts Faith Muthambi and Bathabile Dlamini beautify the opposition benches in Parliament.
So programmed to the permanence of ANC power have we all been that we have interpreted next year’s ANC elective conference as the determinant of who will be president of the republic in 2019.
Within the ANC, the main contenders have not looked beyond their own ranks for rivalry for the post of commander in chief in 2019. In the senior ranks, the positioning for ministerial seats, premierships and MEC positions has only factored in fellow comrades as probable contenders.
Now the game has changed. Only the most myopic cadre will deny that the party will have to work five times as hard to guarantee an above-50% result in three years. And working hard will not just mean putting in long hours and miles doing party work and going door to door.
It will also mean carrying out the hard work of fulfilling the mandate that voters gave the party in 2014 and, to a certain extent, this August 3.
Again, that is just part of the effort. The toughest challenge will be restoring the integrity of the party and winning back the trust of a populace it has treated with disdain. The starting point will be honesty about just how deep the rot goes and how that rot has been allowed to set in and fester.
My guess is, there will be none of that honesty. Instead, there will be a retreat into the laager mentality that says the party’s unity is more important than that of the republic – even if that party unity is to the detriment of its long-term interests. Such is the beauty of denialism.
And what will happen next...
