BRACE yourselves, but stuff's coming out the box here. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has urged South Africans to think before casting their vote in the elections. 

Like, you know, who'd have thought?

It is perhaps by far the most radical and subversive thing Tutu has said in a whole lifetime of saying radical and subversive things.

Thinking, as it is, is not easy. It's mostly higher grade, and you have to work stuff out in your head; squeeze the sparky bits from cranial lobes as the neurons fizz and the gears in there grind and crash and Descartes finds itself before the horse. Or something similarly profound, terminal, ingenious and potentially seismic. Much like the invention of the axle. Without which the invention of the wheel wouldn't have amounted to much. 

Anyway, here we are, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of our democracy and about to go to the polls for the sixth time as a free nation, and we have been asked to think. For ourselves. Dear God, but can any good come from this?

Tutu has pinned his hopes on it. Speaking to reporters at St George's Cathedral on Wednesday, where he gave his assessment of the country's achievements and failings since 1994, he said there was much to be proud of.

"The very fact of our going to celebrate 20 years is a heck of an achievement that itself is a very good reason for us to celebrate. When you look around the world you realise that it is nothing to take for granted, there are so many turbulent parts of the world."

And speaking of turbulence, albeit minor, there was a bit of an overshare when Tutu revealed that he would not be voting for the ANC on May 7. It's the sort of admission that in recent weeks has been accompanied by an alarming propensity for backfiring.  

The road to Damascus is now thick with gangs of the ruling party's whisky-blossomed veterans, and it's getting quite noisy at the toll booths. 

First up was the Ronnie Kasrils-Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge axis. Their drive to get ANC supporters to either spoil their ballots or vote for a minority party (so long as it wasn't the DA) has indeed upset the Zuma nobs. Even the SACP's Mr Potato Head, Blade Nzimande, was roused from his usual reverie of university degrees in collective farming and has been muttering on about "factory faults", whatever that may be.

Poor Kasrils. Ordinarily he'd happily bang on about his leading role in Umkhonte we Sizwe to anyone he could trap in a corner at a cocktail party. How galling then that his military career has been rubbished by ANC general secretary Gwede Mantashe, the Goblin of Stalin, and the MK veterans have labelled him a traitor.

Also on the road were the less "reckless" travellers like Trevor Manuel, Zola Skweyiya, Marion Sparg, Pallo Jordan and Mavuso Msimang. They've been critical of the ANC's burgeoning parasite element in the past but now they've slyly distanced themselves from the Kasrils campaign by arguing that change should instead come from within the party. (Stop laughing at the back there.)

Despite being well aware that wholesale thieving is not a viable economic policy, there seems to be a great reluctance in explaining why they haven't until quite recently raised a word in protest about the corruption, cronyism and ineptitude that has come to characterise public life since - at the very least - December 2007 and the ANC's national conference at Polokwane. Have they all been sleeping?

And, speaking of which, something odd has stirred at the top of the fetid heap. It is President Jacob Zuma's surprising, if insulting challenge that the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, specify how he and his family had "unduly benefitted" from the R246 million upgrade of his Nkandla homestead. (If he'd just read her report, he'd find it's all there: kraal, cattle culvert, chicken run, swimming pool, amphitheatre.)

Here at the Mahogany Ridge we'd all supposed Zuma would at least act "presidential" and refrain from commenting on Madonsela's findings while the Parliamentary ad hoc committee deliberated over her report. That is, he'd take the "statesmanlike" option and pretend nothing was wrong, that all was hunky dory in town and country. 

But no. It seems that a display of petulant bravado was called for - even before the committee had started its work. The fact that seven of its 12 members are ANC Zumaphants has led to speculation that an exercise in damage control was in the offing. But so what? Nkandlagate is here for the long haul irrespective of what the committee does. 

And it would be in the ANC's interests to remember that voters can and certainly do think.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.

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