It seems like every decent journalist has had a pop at the ANC, because it’s tough to show any affinity towards a party that spent the best part of a decade moonlighting as a criminal enterprise.

‘We should be more patient with Cyril,’ goes the cry of those still clinging to the New Dawn, but not everybody is convinced that we are en route to turning this ship around.

One man who is certainly not on board is the Daily Maverick’s Richard Poplak, who has also shown himself to be the king of takedowns (his attack on the EFF last year was a superb effort).

In the wake of yet more ridiculous PR spin from the ANC, trying to defuse the bomb that was yesterday’s truly dire GDP numbers, he seems to have reached breaking point.

Strap in – let’s go through some of the sharper barbs together:

Eighteen months in office, two Cabinet shuffles and a general election later, we are done with maybes. We know exactly who Cyril Ramaphosa is: a party man who hopes to reform South Africa by cleansing the party, so that the party can endlessly expand with only minor tweaks to its standard party operating procedures — a garish form of incrementalism that promises nothing other than that his party will now kill this country more slowly than would otherwise be comfortable.

We’re up and running.

He touches on yesterday’s GDP numbers (awful, as mentioned), but it’s the ANC’s response, via an official press release, that is so worrying.

From that press release:

…the ANC NEC Lekgotla agreed to expand the mandate of the South African Reserve Bank beyond price stability to include growth and employment, It also directed the ANC Government to consider constituting a task team to explore quantity easing measures to address intergovernmental debts to make funds available for developmental purposes.

Quantity easing isn’t a good thing, according to Poplak:

I think by quantity easing they mean “quantitative easing”, which actually means printing money — something “developed countries” do because they make the rules. Regardless, get that biltong and chips platter ready for the International Monetary Fund bailout crew. They’ll be hungry when they arrive in early 2020.

Printing money – when has that ever not worked? Just look at Zimbabwe and Venezuela, and…oh, damn.

Back to the president himself:

Without a natural local consistency — without even so much as a township in Limpopo to call his base — Ramaphosa is sort of a corporate celebrity president who knows which fork to use at dinner with the Queen. A well mannered Big Business deployee, a BEE-minted billionaire, he now heads up a pluto-kleptocracy that is the hallmark of the illiberal democracies emerging across the planet.

As the past year-and-a-half has made clear, his reboot is meant to result in a technocratic government with a self-imposed “austerity” mandate. His people reckon that the best way to get things done is with a fully empowered executive that renders sustainable the patronage network that Zuma solidified around Cabinet appointments.

Like many South Africans, Poplak isn’t impressed with those Cabinet appointments (“the bar is so low — or, rather the bar is visited so often — that the firing of Bathabile Dlamini…was deemed a wise Ramaphosian move”), and he had plenty to say about our esteemed Public Protector (“Busisiwe Mkhwebane is bad at her job — catastrophically so — but she’s the useful kind of useless”).

Let’s go for Ace and ‘The Cat’ next:

Because Zuma fucked up the country so perfectly, and because the ANC is the only portal to comfort for millions of South Africans, politics has devolved into a zero-sum game. There is nowhere for secretary-general Ace Magashule to go, nowhere for Deputy President DD Mabuza to go, nowhere for Jacob Zuma to go — they have to win, or they die in either in jail or in penury. There is nothing else but the ANC…

Soon, bagmen like DD Mabuza will exert their influence, and the ructions will grow bigger and bigger. The unstoppable rise of Julius Malema will, um, not stop. The demons that lurk in any democracy — the shame and pain and hurt of historical indignities — will demand to be salved.

Like all party men, Ramaphosa believes that consensus is possible until the moment he gazes up and sees the glint of the guillotine. The Zen mantra goes something like this: the ANC must remain intact while SOEs remain nationalised as well as privatised, the size and cost of government must be reduced without any reduction in cost and size, while corruption must be eliminated by the very same people perpetrating corruption.

And I want a moon-base full of cocaine. And supermodels.

At least he’s honest.

I’ve skipped over many of his scathing attacks, but if you’re keen for the full experience then read the article here.

Good times.

[source:dailymaverick]