I have spent the last few days going through the reams and reams of copy, real and virtual, generated by the ANC's centenary celebration and President Jacob G Zuma's January 8 address in Mangaung ...
Although hope springs eternal in this particular human breast, I have to concede that it has been a somewhat depressing experience.
Even if you managed to read one-eighth only of what I have, I would imagine that you know what I am talking about.
But here, to give you a taste if you didn't get one on Sunday, is an excerpt from Zuma's mind-numbingly long speech:
"With regards to the way forward, we have identified the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality as needing attention.Principally, Africans, women and youth continue to carry a disproportionate burden of the challenges.
"Over the next decade, both the ANC and all organs of state shall pay single-minded and undivided attention in order to overcome these triple challenges. Our education and training system should be the cornerstone of all efforts to radically transform South Africa and build a truly non-racial, non-sexist, democratic, united and prosperous society."
Trouble, I suppose, is that everyone - from commentators, analysts, news readers, and editors, to Sipho Q Public - seemed to think that Zuma, or at least his speech writers, would experience some sort of epiphany on the road to Mangaung, like Paul's life-changing one on the road to Damascus.
Everyone was hoping for a bit of the "vision thing", as George HW Bush (the old boy) once infamously referred to it. But it was, alas, not to be. In addition, Zuma delivered his speech very poorly indeed.
I was amused to read an ANC youth league reaction to a January 7 story in the Saturday Star in which it was alleged that Julius Malema had said ANC leaders were baboons.
The ANCYL vehemently denied this, saying that Malema "addressed the rally in SePedi, [but] the journalist who wrote the story does not have even the slightest understanding of [this] language. [The journalist] instead relied on a lousy interpretation of a bystander."
What occurred to me was that, on Sunday, Zuma held the crowd's attention so badly that he might as well have been talking SePedi or even classical Greek. Perhaps he was merely weary: it had been a busy, emotionally-fraught weekend for him, and he is after all in his 70th year.
Anyway, although I am not employed as the president's spokesperson, I do believe there are some points that should be made by way of restoring (I hope) some perspective.
First, Business Day newspaper remarked that "...in a bland address that surely must have been deliberate ..."
Why? Why would the president or his writers deliberately mess things up on January 8? He and they might be incompetent but why gratuitously attribute male fides to them?
Second, the vision thing. The event was the ANC's centenary: a celebration of the movement's last 100 years.
So, though it might have been a golden opportunity, as one analyst suggested, for a "fractious ANC to get its act together and lay down a blueprint for the next 100 years," and though it might have been valuable if Zuma had said something constructive about, say, job creation, housing, health care, and education, it was the ANC's celebration of a 100 years of existence, not a policy conference. That comes in the middle of this year.
Third, let's remember that, whether we like it or not, the world view of ANC leaders such as Zuma (the older ex-exiles) to a large extent flows from their training and interaction with the stodgy former Eastern Bloc. The Mangaung centenary celebration was a classic, old-style showpiece, something out of Red Square or whatever the Havana equivalent is called.
Of course, therefore, Zuma was going to offer what one newspaper called "promises without any palpable detail". This is what you do on such occasions. He wasn't exactly going to roll out a blow by blow, detailed blueprint.
Third, the ongoing, implicit - and sometimes explicit - comparison of Zuma with past ANC leaders is a bit of the proverbial apples with bananas comparison.
No, Zuma is perhaps "not comparable" to OR Tambo. But Tambo and his predecessors did not have to govern the republic, did they?
Besides, I think the comparisons of Zuma with his predecessors, including Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, are a trifle odious for the simple reason that "the game" is now a very different one.
What former President Mandela had to do was to keep smiling and to continue being the brilliant reconciler that he was. He did not have to do much actual governing. Mbeki apparently did much of that for him.
And all that former President Mbeki had to do was to keep the government rolling in an apparently efficient and technocratic way. But do our present woes- in nearly every sector of governance - not stem from the three terms prior to Zuma's (and, of course, as the ANC keeps reminding us, from the years before those)?
I concede that it seems clearer and clearer every day that Zuma is not on top of the job of leading the country and that his ministers seem baffled by the extent to which the wheels have fallen off.
But this is not a reason to blame him alone for the problems that we face. And there certainly seems no good reason to suggest that he should grapple with these issues, and with the issue of his own leadership, while occupying the public podium at a centenary celebration.
Still, even optimistic souls such as I have to admit that the future is not looking good - I mean internationally as well as locally, given the state of world economies, especially in Europe.
And it would have been appropriate for the president to have, for his own political sake as much as ours, to have been more lively and engaging during his January 8 speech and to have tried to suggest that his government and party do have some palpable plans for the future.
Jeremy Gordin has written or co-authored three books, including the bestselling biography of Jacob Zuma. He is director of the Wits Justice Project. This article first appeared in the Daily Dispatch.
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