Happy Women’s Day, Dr Makhosi Khoza, you deserved far more

There was that immortal moment after last night’s no-confidence vote when Speaker Baleka Mbete was reading the results and when, just for a few seconds, I believed Zuma had lost.

Mbete announced that 177 MPs had voted against him and the opposition started cheering.

“Yoooh!” I announced to my fiancee. “It’s happened.”

It was a weird feeling, I must admit, to think that I was living in a Zuma-free South Africa (and, yes, for just a moment, my faith in humanity was restored).

Granted, I’ve never been great at maths, because Mbete then offered the ANC a reason to cheer of its own when she gave them the nays at 198, with nine abstentions. (Immediately, my long-running understanding of the awfulness of humanity came streaming back).

So Zuma will be allowed to continue to Zuma for a few months more.

This was probably a good thing, ultimately, for a handful of reasons I had tried to come up with ahead of the vote.

All the same, for those of us for whom the Zuma years feel like an ongoing waking nightmare, it was very disappointing. In moments like that, it’s hard to intellectualise the merits and demerits of secrecy and unintended consequences. You just want the pain to end.

I can only imagine how crushing it must have felt to those in the ANC who had been more outspoken and genuinely had faith that enough of their ANC colleagues would make the moral choice and vote out a man who has clearly sold his country for a billion plates of curry.

Spare a thought, particularly, for Dr Makhosi Khoza and Mondli Gungubele, who will probably receive even more wrath from their party now as the proxies for all the turncoats Jackson Mthembu will not be able to easily sniff out.

Analysts reckon the ANC will now be looking to punish all those who did not toe the party line in the quest to restore “party unity” – however, maybe they will just let these beaten dogs lie.

Thanks to the secret ballot, many of the other more than 30 ANC MPs (or so it is theorised) who either cast their ballots against Zuma or decided not to vote at all are safe from retribution.

Obviously Derek Hanekom voted against Zuma too (but that man is past the point of caring what happens to him) and Pravin Gordhan surely also voted against the two-headed dancing giggler.

I’m glad I’m not the one tasked with trying to hold together in one shaky hand this sloppy bowl of greasy spaghetti that was once described as the greatest liberation movement in African history.

If Zuma wanted to avoid even worse PR fallout, he would just leave all these enemies alone right now. They can’t really hurt him any more. They’ve done their worst and it was not good enough – falling short at the last hurdle thanks to a mere 11 votes that would have turned the final result the other way.

Perhaps the death threats against Khoza will stop now, too, because the threat she posed has been nullified.

I hope she can just get on with her life now, in peace, whether that’s in the ANC or a million other organisations who deserve her far more.

Happy Women’s Day Dr Khoza, you deserved far more last night. We all deserved far more last night.

At least you know you will always be on the right side of history. I’m not a sangoma, but I can promise you this: 20 years from now, when historians hunt down all your fellow MPs to ask them to tell us which way they really voted in the secret vote against Zuma, most of them will probably tell us they voted for him to go.

It will be very difficult to know who’s telling the truth, and those people will be a lot like all the “who, me?” white people who surround us today and who we mock for declaring that they never supported apartheid and never voted for the National Party. Somehow, the National Party continued to win all those elections without anyone having voted for them.

You will sit there and know that most of your former MP colleagues will be lying. They will be wishing in their shrivelled hearts that they could have lived just one day of their pitiable lives with even a quarter of your courage.

But we will never be able to doubt where your heart lay, and it was with the people, not parochial party politics.

Salute! May this day be yours.

Charles Cilliers, Citizen.co.za digital editor