Ace supporters: Simply hoping for a future spot at the trough?

What is wrong with these people?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately, often while watching gangs of teenage “struggle veterans” in badly fitting fatigues and other poor and unemployed folks in party regalia gather outside courtrooms, to defend the very architects of their misery.

And by “these people”, I’m not referring to the professional sycophants who would kill off their own mothers for a quick buck and the opportunity to increase their proximity to power (here’s looking at you, Carl). I’m referring to the ordinary rank-and-file members of the ANC.

These are the very same people who are worst affected by the follies of the Jacob Zuma years. These are the people who have to absorb the losses in economic growth created by years of looting and mismanagement. The ones who go to bed in cold, dark homes, due to the inability of our state power utility to do the single job it has been created and funded to the tune of hundreds of billions to do.

The ones who continue to support a party that oversaw the collapse of nearly every profitable state-owned entity (SOE), while their foreign overlords siphoned off billions under the guise of black economic empowerment.

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It is these same people who are incapable of putting food on the table, in a country where 30% of the population is unemployed and 49% live under the upper poverty line, while the leaders they defend drive around in luxury cars paid for with tax money, and their children holiday in Dubai with the Guptas.

So, yeah… “WTF is wrong with these people?” I asked myself again on Friday morning, while watching a grown man humiliate himself in Bloemfontein, in support of his glorious leaders.

But then in the corner of my screen I saw a familiar face, and it all started to make a little more sense.

The face was that of a university acquaintance. Let’s just call him Motaung.

Motaung and I had shared a few boozy nights out with mutual friends during our years at that paragon of academic excellence, the University of the Free State. We were never really close friends, and had had zero contact for many years since graduating.

Back when I was a journalist in Bloemfontein, working for a little television station, Motaung suddenly reached out to me, and asked if he and his business partner could come pay me a visit, as they had a proposal for me.

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My anti-MLM sensor automatically kicked in, and I told him that I wasn’t interested in trading forex, binary options, or investing in his essential oils business. He assured me, however, that it was a legitimate business idea and they thought I would be the perfect person to join their company.

So, the meeting happened, and I was given a glimpse into the inner workings of how business is done in the dirty world of factional politics. This was shortly before the ANC’s Mangaung conference in December 2012, and there was a battle waging in the province between current ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule and a group of dissidents referred to as the Regime Change faction.

This clash infamously ended up in the Constitutional Court, with the Free State delegation to Mangaung having their votes barred, and the province’s PEC being disbanded right in the middle of the conference.

Motaung and his partner’s business idea basically boiled down to this: they would feed me misinformation and dirt on Magashule, which I would have published via my then employer’s television and online platforms, as well as on a new media platform they planned to create and which I was expected to edit.

The idea behind all of this was that they would help see the undoing of Magashule’s reign in the Free State, while setting up alternative misinformation channels to the network of yellow rags and Bell Pottinger-esque trash media which Magashule was said to be running in the province at the time. The expectation was that this would set us up to take over from the Magashule camp once the Regime Changers elected their premier, and we would all be knee-deep in the dirty money.

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This is how instant millionaires are made in the Free State.

I naturally told them to go to hell, since I had no interest in selling my integrity to join a group of looters whose only interest was getting access to the feeding troughs, and I all but forgot about Motaung.

That is, until I saw him on television on Friday morning, dressed in his party colours and supporting the very man he had once planned to screw over. I have no idea if he is a millionaire yet, but his presence outside the Bloemfontein Magistrate’s Court made me realise exactly what is wrong with these people.

It is not that they are simply misguided fools, blindly supporting Magashule, a man they believe to be fighting for their best interests. Nor are they ignorant of the fact that he and Zuma are looters and thugs who are willing to use state machinery to destroy opponents and turn SOEs into personal ATMs.

No. They are fully aware of what a Magashule presidency will hold for them.

They see the RET-faction setting up its pawns all over the board, and getting ready to retake the ANC through Magashule’s relentless recruitment drive and stuffing of branches with loyal cronies countrywide, as he used to do it in the Free State for so many years.

They see him moving his obese, camo-clad knights into positions where they could threaten the stability of the country, while painting the legal and justice system as an opposing castle, unwilling to give the poor a taste of the wealth they have been hoarding for centuries.

They see him setting himself up as the traditional African strongman, and instead of trying to fight his attacks on our democracy and its legal systems, they are making sure they are in position to pick up some of the scraps he will inevitably drop once he has his celebratory feast.

That is what is wrong with these people. They are like those poor factory workers, staunchly defending the very capitalist system which oppresses them, because they hope they could also become an exploitative billionaire someday.

They are all so eager to book themselves a space at a future feast, that they are willing to trample on everything our country holds dear to get there.

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Earl Coetzee

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