Welcome to Cyril’s annual version of Scheherazade’s flights of fantasy

With its customary cack-handed timing, Eskom on Thursday – after days and nights of load shedding – suspended the pain. Whoop-dee-doo!

It’s the second year Eskom has avoided blackouts on this day. News24 reports that the government paid Eskom R7 to R10 million an hour to suspend cuts on this “special day”.

This meant the entire nation lacked a plausible excuse to avoid the torture of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s annual version of Scheherazade’s flights of fantasy, known as the State of the Nation Address (Sona).

The Arabian storytelling fabulist’s tall tales lasted 1,001 nights. Our president’s fiction only felt that long.

Running Sona through the text analysis program, Grammarly, the verdict was positive.

The programme computed it would take 58 minutes to speak. It took Ramaphosa 81 minutes, what with presidential gravitas, and all.

READ MORE: Sona 2021: Eskom will still fall short of power capacity over next five years

Sona’s content was “very engaging” and the tone was “just right”, although it lacked “a bit” in clarity.

By the time you read this, the media will have dissected every nuance of Sona 2020.

Suffice it to say, if you expected f**k-all, you wouldn’t have been disappointed, although there was the usual intellectual frippery that’s hauled out to titivate such showcase occasions.

The president’s speechwriters again whipped hard his favourite botanical metaphor, that of the hardy protea.

The protea, Ramaphosa points out, not only survives fire, but demands it – a regular Phoenix-like death and resurrection is essential for it to thrive.

The comparison makes perfect sense. The reason the government is deliberately screwing up the economy is so that a new, command council version can emerge from the ashes.

Ramaphosa has become omnipresent on television, ladling out dollops of reassurance and inspiration. This is his fifth Sona – and since the pandemic he has appeared about once a month.

It’s all very well for him to say Eskom will be fixed, government spending will be cut, corruption will be curbed, violent crime controlled and broadband rolled out, but he has made all these promises before.

ALSO READ: Sona 2021 First Take: Ramaphosa’s ‘empty’ words to an ‘empty’ Parliament?

While nations need to have goals, these need to be credible.

There’s no need for Grammarly’s artificial intelligence, or the thousands of words that the commentariat will devote to Sona, to assess its credibility.

Simply view it through a single filter, the recent statements of two high-ranking ANC members to the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture.

Reacting to former president Jacob Zuma’s refusal to obey a Constitutional Court order to appear before the commission, secretary-general Ace Magashule was quick to signal where the party stood.

“Why should we call him into order when he’s done nothing wrong?”

And this week, deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte expanded on the party’s understanding of democratic constitutionalism.

It was most worrying, she wrote, that “democratic centralism is now the subject of a commission led by a judge who… practises his craft based on the narrow parameters of existing laws”.

There are deep cleavages in the ANC and, so far, Cyril has not bridged them.

Until that power struggle is resolved, it’s impossible for Sona promises to be anything but hot air.

READ MORE: Sona 2021 ‘the definition of insanity’, says EFF’s Shivambu

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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