Anyone who believes gobbledegook is a flourishing art form will have been well pleased at the joint statement issued last week by Messrs T Mbeki and J Zuma, CEO and Acting Assistant CEO of the people’s consortium, African National Congress, National Party and Imvume Incorporated. Even in its edited form this statement was a masterpiece of its kind. Headed ‘Let the law take its course”, say Mbeki and Zuma jointly, the Sunday Times in publishing it — quite charitably I thought — described it as being a statement ‘on the way forward for the fractured ruling party”.
To subedit the original, they must have used some sort of literary angle-grinder. The properties of the mother lode are of a specific gravity usually associated with black holes in space: so dense that even light cannot escape. Certainly, no light escapes from this blurred essay on the primary necessities of post-apartheid togetherness. But a sort of dim ruby glow can been seen if you hold it close to any SABC television news broadcast. Here’s a bit of it I prised off with a crowbar.
Collective leadership is a central pillar of our organisational principles. This requires a culture of openness and, among leaders, solidarity and comradeship towards one another, as well as respect for an acceptance of decisions of the collective while each member of the collective retains the right to raise and re-raise any matter, within constitutional structures, which she or he believes requires review.
No matter how hard you try to understand a passage like that, with its sublime lack of any meaning at all, you are left cold. Those two sentences have all the transparency of the Voortrekker Monument. The hollow repetitions, the party-imprinted jargon that was so popular among the gatekeepers of practical Marxism: a coagulated vernacular so effectively used to humble human individuality and hope; the dialogue of commissars and party secretaries as moral alibi. That sort of stuff belongs 60 or 70 years ago, when there came into being the lightless idioms of ‘collectives” and ‘solidarities”, the ‘cadres” and ‘revolutionaries”, the colloquy of grey socialism. The piece from Zuma and Mbeki is racked with this utopian cant. Chisel the bones out of this one.
In carrying out their tasks, individuals should be guided by the mandate of the movement’s constitutional structures. These structures should themselves in turn appreciate the prerogatives they allocate to individuals they deploy, arising out of the confidence they have in such individuals.
Those two sentences are a direct lift from the celebrated 1950s publication, A Comrade’s Bible — An Apparatchik’s Handbook of Useful Phrases and Sentences, and which won the 1944 Lenin Bronze Medal for People’s Opacity. Refer to Chapter Three: ‘How to fool your comrades into believing their sacrifices are part of some greater social purpose”.
I can’t help but wonder what sort of reader the two authors had in mind when they assembled their grim apologia. Who would find rambling ditherings like these as having any relevance to anything at all? Will some sorely abused road worker, leaning wearily on his pick-axe, be gladdened that in carrying out his tasks he is guided by the mandate of the movement’s constitutional structures? Will some desperately ill young woman with Aids be drained of her terrors by knowing that there is a deployment of appreciation of her prerogatives?
Almost the best bit, if not the most revealing of all, comes quite early on in the statement. With just these few lines are let slip a Luthuli House posture that might better have been kept from sight. Having referred somewhat obliquely to the gaping chasm now forming between elements of the tripartite alliance, Mbeki and Zuma expand:
Precisely because of this pain and anger, it is critical that the leadership should rise above the fray and find mature ways of dealing with the challenges. The danger is that, incorrectly handled, the situation can worsen, further dividing and weakening the movement and the forces of fundamental change.
We proceed from the premise that the current events present a real danger of steadily but surely eroding public confidence in the ANC. Without decisive leadership, the current situation lends itself to exploitation by opportunistic elements and even counter-revolution. It demoralises all cadres of the movement and confuses the masses.
Indeed, let the leadership rise above the fray, preserve its dignity. But who are these ‘masses”, who may so wantonly be confused? To call such a term disdainful is to understate. Whatever the context, the word ‘masses”, when used to describe the greater population, is derogatory. It belongs with other upper-class snipings such as ‘The Great Unwashed” and ‘Joe Public”. It’s an ‘Us-Up-Here-and-Them-Down-There” kind of word.
We can only hope these confusable masses will gather strength from knowing there is someone up there in what Lenin called the ‘vanguard elite”, always ready to explain things that otherwise would go straight over their silly heads.
If you think watching personal political vanities implode can be fun, you should get hold of a copy of last week’s Sunday Times. And hurry up. I hear the national executive council is going to sell-on the article as land-fill under another of Sol Kerzner’s lost cities.