RICHARD POPLAK

Uncle Gweezy drifted through the Tshwane Events Centre like a dishevelled ghost. He rode the escalator up. He rode the escalator down.

As the second most unpowerful man in the country, he had very little to do. His deputy, Jesse Duarte, was covering the ANC comms base, her eyes red, the stench of genuine fear rising off her.

Occasionally Uncle Gweezy would hover over her shoulder as a computer monitor spat up lthy data. The ANC all but wiped out in the Western Cape. Nelson Mandela Bay gone. Tshwane gone. Under 50% in Ekurhuleni.

And, potentially, the loss of Johannesburg to a beauty goods salesman who thinks urbanism is something you sprinkle over a steak.

As the ignominies kept piling up, Gweezy’s cor- poreal form shimmered away into nothingness. The secretary general of theAfrican National Congress, which was just 22 years ago the greatest political brand in the known world, was disappearing. In terms of political longevity, it has taken almost no time whatsoever for the democratic custodians of the Mandela’s out t to transform themselves into characters in a Coolio song.And the Gweezmeister is ExhibitA in this, the case of the Great Degrading.

How did they screw it up, you ask? The short answer would be: hubris (of which Uncle Gweezy is an endless purveyor). The long answer is longer, but most of its data points were examined by Franz Fanon, long before theANC was installing its presi- dents in massively overpriced Zulu theme parks.

“Cast your eyes at the board,” said a grim-faced Duarte, of the vast screen that dominated the elec- toral centre. “Since the 2014 national elections, four million more people have voted for the ANC – to me, that it is not a defeat. That is nothing to sneeze away. And local elections here historically and internationally have a lower voter output. That doesn’t mean we’re losing the country.”

But, Duarte was just being Duarte, and had screwed up the numbers. This was a local election, over the course of which punters tick one ballot for a ward councillor, another for popular representa- tion and, outside the metros, a third for a district municipality. The deputy sec gen was mistaking slips of paper for individual humans; the numbers could not be compared to the 11 million people who voted for ANC/president Jacob Zuma nationally in 2014. At the ringing of the bell following these elections, roughly 16 million ballots were marked in favour of the ANC, slightly less than there were in the last comparable contest, back in 2011.

This is the species of genius we’re dealing with, folks.

The story of these elections is about a tumbling, a squandering, a cellular meltdown. The story of these elections is not a story about winning, or a story about the “triumph of democracy”, whatever that means.

The story of these elections is loss.

The rst most powerless person in South Af- rica walked his way through the electoral centre, glad-handing, ball buttering, ashing his superb

teeth. He was here for one of those stage-managed nonsense photo ops, in which an of cial explains to a billionaire how sh*tty Dell computers collate data, and how the IEC-branded mousepads work.

Outwardly, Cyril Ramaphosa was sanguine. He had just recovered from the u, he said. A result of the toll of campaigning, he told us. As he walked his way to the event centre’s lower level, two members of the Inkatha Freedom Party bumped into him. A day earlier, they had learned that their party retained the Nkandla ward, aka president Jacob Zuma’s ‘hood. Imagine a country in which the president can’t win an election on his own ancestral ground, where he is literally turned out by his neighbours. “We’re looking forward to providing the president with basic services,” an IFP of cial told the deputy president.

“But it doesn’t mean we’re gonna pay back the money,” said another.

Cyril threw back his great bald head, and laughed.

After the photo-op, after the cameras melted away, Ramaphosa found himself facing a gentle- man named Dr Pieter Groenewald, who serves as chairman of the Vryheidsfront Plus.

“Julle sal die kingmakers wees (you’ll be the kingmakers),” said Ramaphosa, in his nest Pidgin Afrikaans. Then he got semi-serious, offering a small disquisition on strategic, tactical political manoeuvring. “In politics, there is no never never,” said Ramaphosa. “Sometimes you have to cross the river on the back of a crocodile.”

Groenewald countered with his own story of a scorpion crossing a river on the back of a tortoise. Then, Uncle Gweezy appeared from nowhere, leaning over Ramaphosa’s shoulder. “Never sé nooit nie (never say never),” he said to Groenewald, inhis nestPidginAfrikaans.“Neversénooitnie.”

It was like a National Geographic radio play voiced by carnies who had just crawled out of a moonshine barrel.

Groenewald was unmoved. The type of guy who has skinned several kudu with his teeth, and was likely married in a safari suit, everyone was trying to get into his kortbroek. In three dusty, windblown municipalities, the VF+ held percent- ages sizeable enough to make them prospective coalition partners.

Hence the love from the country’s richest un- powerful man.

“Us, we have to gure out what is best for mu- nicipality, and then we’ll decide who to partner with,” Groenewald told me. “For instance, if the EFF want to nationalise this and that, it makes it impossible.”

How about the DA? “Ag, there will always be preconditions with the DA, but we don’t have principle problems as far as DA are concerned.”

Uncle Gweezy and the Gang?

“We don’t believe they govern in the interest of the community, and therefore will not comply with how we would hope to do things. We will not form a coalition with the ANC.”

tongue-bathing a human antique whose party’s stated mission is “[the irrevocable commitment] to the realisation of communities’, in particular the Afrikaner’s, internationally recognised right to self-determination, territorial or otherwise”.

Welcome to the New New South Africa.

Plunderer-In-Chief

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