/ 19 December 2017

uBaba’s left us two Dark Lords

Jacob Zuma has proclaimed his innocence
Jacob Zuma has proclaimed his innocence

Things are getting tense at the ANC’s national elective conference. Comrades are suffering finger-fatigue from the continuous number-crunching that accompanies all the backstabbing and double-crossing that passes as lobbying before the party’s “top six” vote.

None more so than Enoch Godongwana, the Cyril Ramaphosa lobbyist and ANC national executive member. The comrade has been permanently peering at his smartphone calculator because of all these rumours of double-back-flip-cabrioles to the other side by various sections of delegates running through the conference rumour mill.

Just when you think you’ve nailed down a voting bank someone goes and doubles their airtime and triples their blessings. The ANC is becoming less Albertina Sisulu and more Khanyi Mbau by the day. If only it ran like a canary yellow Lamborghini instead of a battered Citi Golf on bricks.

Which is why it’s time to end the Zupta control of the ANC and start a new Oppenheimer dawn for the country. Our Man from Marikana must become president of this august movement — even if he doesn’t read transformation reports and calls for the police’s “concomitant action” against protesting citizens while drawing some fat pay cheques.

I hope Godongwana’s tendons won’t snap before he has the opportunity to stick the middle finger to uBaba after the votes have been counted. The comrade deserves that satisfaction after all the hard work he has been putting into the CR17 campaign of late. He is a serious cat and it would halve the collective IQ of the current ANC national executive committee if he were to be purged.

Our man in the CR17 accounts department assures me that some Mpumalanga delegates may have skinned their own cat, provincial chairperson DD Mabuza. If the dark Lord Voldemort of Barberton is running out of lives, that leaves me concerned about driveway drive-bys and poisoned kisses of death at Nasrec.

But it may explain why Free State not-chairperson Ace Magashule was looking so glum, sitting slumped and alone on a park bench in the conference laager earlier.

The votes are still being hand-counted while I write this on my copy of the organisational review before making a paper jet and sending it off hopefully towards the media compound where the Mail & Guardian sub-editors have been incarcerated in a newsroom shack. So I’m still on edge about the results.

Everybody’s paranoid. Including uButternuthead, who had 18 presidential guards plus another 10 plainclothes spies clotheslining the media mob during his presidential walk-about of the progressive business forum earlier today. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer lot, mind you, but Nxamalala better realise that he is so yesterday’s news that South Africans are already hoping to use him to line the parrot cage.

Perhaps he needed the bodyguards to stop his businessman-blesser Roy Moodley from photo-bombing one of these choreographed flesh-pumpers. Moodley was lingering in the background with the expectant look of a brown envelope in the back pocket on his face.

It is because of Msholozi and his dodgier-than-thou ways that we are contemplating a “top six” with Mabuza as deputy president and Magashule as secretary general. Which is a bit like imagining Pablo Escobar running government business while Al Capone does the same at the ANC.

If there is an enduring memory of the conference it will not be Zuma’s final political report to the ANC. Nor will it be his crocodile tears at the end of this conference.

It will be, rather, the sight of a driver slumped asleep at the wheel of his car, which was waiting for the robot to change at the busy intersection leading into Nasrec. Hooting didn’t wake him up, neither did the earnest tapping of his mates on his window. Eventually two traffic cops with too much to do managed to rouse the slumber-bunny. The traffic cops motioned for the comrade to pull over and sleep away his drunkenness. He nodded in groggy agreement. But as the coppers turned their attention towards a blue lights looking for a thoroughfare, the driver with smart handbrake turn, jigga’d.

That, in a nutshell, is how Nxamalala has been doughnutting his route away from the law.