A colleague this week complained that we were wasting space in our newspaper by dedicating it to historic events, which have no real news value now.
He was speaking about the celebration of the release of Nelson Mandela. I sincerely believe he did not mean to demean the struggle; he was just speaking his mind — though it was striking that he should feel that the single event that changed the course of this country’s history, and secured his future and mine, should be the one he singled out.
To him it was a “great event when it happened, but let’s move on now”. In his attitude, I saw myself and many other South Africans; we are all guilty of “short-termism”. And we are all so malleable. We are interested in the here and now, and are so quick to consign history to the dustbin.
We are momentarily outraged that the country’s president, Jacob Zuma, has with a friend’s child sired yet another child out of wedlock. We are then even more dumbfounded by his logic — that once he has paid inhlawulo, he has taken personal responsibility and that should be the end of the matter.
We fall just short of asking him to resign, but are all mortified by South Africa’s international reputation as represented by this first citizen. But ever the strategist, Zuma releases a statement apologising on a Saturday, essentially dictating the content of the country’s largest newspapers on Sunday. He gets the front page on his terms and we all move on.
Moving on means mechanically changing gear — disconnecting from the discourse of Zuma the philanderer to speculate on his state of the nation speech.
We are so easily gratified and gullible. It reminds me of how former president Thabo Mbeki was crucified for a very long time for not speaking out against Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe. And once he had muttered a reluctant, incoherent disapproval, we were left with nothing to say other than “too little, too late”.
Another vivid example concerns former Gauteng premier Mbhazima Shilowa, who was once as reviled as Julius Malema is now. As general secretary of Cosatu, he was to the extreme left of the ANC and so treated as a constant menace to business, international investors and the unsettled minorities.
I remember him being blamed for the depreciation of the rand — and then Freedom Front leader Constant Viljoen said our currency should be renamed “the shilowa”.
But not long afterwards he assumed the influential position of premier of the powerful Gauteng province. And he was soon revered as the sensible, urbane and most practical of South Africa’s premiers.
I saw a similar reinvention concerning Fikile Mbalula, once the ANC Youth League president and now deputy police minister. In his former role he was despised generally for being a loose cannon and specifically for calling ANC Women’s League members “holy cows” who were paralysed and paraplegic.
And remember when he and Zizi Kodwa said at a youth league press conference that they would call Zuma’s rape accuser “Lucifer”? The outcry was unbelievable.
But we all embrace them now, one as a deputy minister and the other as presidential spokesperson. Kodwa even attracted 2 000 celebrities to his bling-bling birthday party, and he now jokes that he is planning to have his next party at the FNB Stadium to accommodate the ever-growing numbers.
So when Zuma says Malema will one day be ANC president, there are howls of disbelief. But Msholozi knows what he is talking about: few people understand the South African psyche as well as he does, having toyed with our minds and hearts for the past few years.
And he knows that, despite the current headlines about his being too compromised to run for a second term as president, when the ANC considers another term, one issue that will not be a consideration is that he once fathered a child outside of wedlock with a certain Sonono Khoza. He would have apologised and closed that chapter.
So I suppose it is the same with Mandela — he gave us reconciliation, the Rainbow Nation, re-admission into international sport, international accolades and so on and so forth. But why would we want to remember that? That’s just us.