ANC’s 112th birthday bash went well, by ANC standards

There were grandiose speeches and big promises, but when all was said and done the ANC’s get-together at the weekend was a fairly conventional birthday party for a 112-year-old, with young people it didn’t recognise shouting into its ear as they sized up which items of jewellery and furniture they’d nick once the poor old thing finally breathed its last. 

As is so often the case when once-great families gather, it was the dead-eyed trust-fund babies who were the loudest and most confident in their claims that it was they, and not their grandparents, who’d actually done the hard work and who needed the warmest applause.

Not that one can really blame them. One of the benefits of being the final, desperately disappointing iteration of a famous line is the innate sense of manifest destiny leading irresistibly to you, imbuing you with the unshakeable confidence that history has bent towards this very moment; that everything that has happened has happened to bring you to this porta potty, snorting this cocaine, off this toilet seat. 

To be clear, that was a metaphor: I’m not suggesting anyone in the ANC snorts cocaine in porta potties, mostly because none of them has the administrative skills to source both cocaine and porta potties at the same time.

Indeed, when President Cyril Ramaphosa clambered up onto the shoulders of long-dead giants to list the ANC’s recent achievements, I was surprised that he didn’t mention the greatest of them all: convincing Mbombela to allow the ANC to use its stadium without first demanding a nonrefundable 95% deposit in Krugerrands. 

Last week, Ramaphosa told a crowd that “those who think the ANC can be airbrushed out of existence are dreaming”, presumably because most of the country’s PhotoShop experts have emigrated. On the contrary, he explained, the ANC was here to stay because it “had embedded itself in the hearts and minds of our people”. 

Of course, there are some good antiparasitic treatments that could sort that right out, but if he meant that the ANC is still popular, he would have been pleased to see the tens of thousands of faithful supporters in the stadium, reminding him of happier, easier times.

Granted, there were reports that the party hadn’t planned how to get its crowd back to the company it had rented it from, and there were rumours of people clad in ANC regalia sleeping in disconsolate heaps on the streets of the town, but those might have been SABC reporters who’d tried to read Ramaphosa’s speech. Besides, the whole point of the politics of spectacle is the show, not what happens to the props once the lights go out.

Certainly, the EFF seemed particularly excited by the visuals of a partially full stadium, taking to social media to crow that its stadium crowds were at least an inch longer than the ANC’s and that it had a real girlfriend, no matter what anyone said. I’d be interested to know if any psychologists have looked into the EFF’s fetishisation of stadium capacity. 

Of course, I understand that it can be exciting to see people coming to your event: when a 12th person tiptoes apologetically into the back of one of my book launches I think I get a real taste of what Taylor Swift experiences when she looks out from the stage. 

Still, nobody gets quite as euphoric about such gatherings — or so triggered when another party stages one — as the EFF. I suspect it reveals something to us about the fundamental — and fundamentalist — nature of the party, where performances of unity and loyalty are a valid substitute for workable policy and bureaucratic competence, but I stand to be corrected. 

I also digress. The point is that the stadium event went pretty well by ANC standards, and, thanks to the celebrity golf day that happened late last week, the party might even be able to pay for some of it, or at least pay a lawyer to explain why it can’t.

I’m not sure what I’d pay to play a round of golf with Ramaphosa. On the one hand, it would be something to tell my friends. On the other, I’m probably going to have a Sterri Stumpie later, so I need money for that.

I’m also not sure I could cope with the social anxiety of it all. We’d run out of things to say after 10 minutes, and I’d start making nervous jokes — “So, what’s your handicap, other than Fikile Mbalula?” — and then I’d ask him to make my double bogey disappear — “Just pretend it’s a wad of money in your couch” — and then his protection detail would call Paul Mashatile’s protection detail to escort me to hospital, and that would be that. 

Luckily for Ramaphosa, though, the only fiction writers he ever spends time with are the people who formulate the ANC’s election promises, so there seems to have been an impressive number of business owners eager to spend the day throwing good money after bad. 

Yes, it was a happy birthday for apparatchiks and hustlers, but for the old fighter — lost, confused, and endlessly humiliated by its predatory grandchildren — it was one more shuffling, painful step towards the end.

I hope when that end comes it is peaceful and painless. I hope when it happens the party gets the obituaries it deserves. But above all, I hope it comes soon.

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.