The weekend’s Liberation Movements Summit in Johannesburg was a who’s who of southern African revolutionaries, mainly because many of them are very old and kept asking who was who.
That was a joke, of course, but then so was the summit. I’m sure there were various pragmatic reasons for Zanu-PF to attend, not least to ask Thabo Mbeki if he might be open to helping them liberate Zimbabwe’s people from democracy for a couple more election cycles, but any event that spends three days talking about improving the lives of southern Africans while hosting Emmerson Mnangagwa’s goons is a walking punchline.
Not that anyone was laughing, mind you, especially not during Cyril Ramaphosa’s address in which he warned that a new scramble for African resources was under way and that foreign powers were once again hell-bent on bringing about regime change.
Unfortunately I can’t tell you who, exactly, is doing the scrambling — revolutionary friends don’t let revolutionary friends mention names if it would require them also to name China or Russia’s Wagner group — but I do know that the president is correct about people wanting regime change: just last year 60% of South Africans voted to get rid of the ANC.
This would be a bad thing, Ramaphosa explained, because, despite some of the attending liberation movements being in power for many decades, they hadn’t yet had a chance to complete the revolution.
“Our position remains very clear,” said Ramaphosa. “Liberation is indivisible. We are not truly free until all are free.”
The point is that Ramaphosa was choosing his words carefully; so carefully, in fact, that he accidentally revealed the rot at the heart of the entire event.
It was true but it did make me think about Eswatini, that blighted little kingdom next door where liberation is less indivisible than invisible. Did the assembled freedom fighters have a plan, I wondered, to try to liberate it from Africa’s last absolute monarch, a cynical tyrant who exploits his people as relentlessly as many oppressors of the 20th century? Comrades? Hello? Is this thing on?
Then again, given that Eswatini has just agreed to accept 150 “terrorists” deported from the US by the Trump administration, perhaps it was politic of Ramaphosa not to go poking that gilded bear again.
To be clear, I don’t know if those 150 people are in fact terrorists. It is entirely possible that many of them are undocumented grandmothers visiting from Mexico, or white Americans who feel asleep on their tanning beds, or the person who filmed Trump cheating at golf in Scotland over the weekend.
If, however, they are bad hombres, and given that they will be out of jail and across the border faster than you can say “bribes paid in hard currency”, I wonder what Trump’s local admirers think about him sending terrorists to South Africa. Then again, I suppose they’ll do what they always do: either blame Biden or say it’s all part of God’s plan.
But I digress. The point is that Ramaphosa was choosing his words carefully; so carefully, in fact, that he accidentally revealed the rot at the heart of the entire event.
It was most evident in the part where he admitted that a “frustrated” younger generation “wants jobs, justice, dignity, housing, education, health and security, and sees our movements as distant, rigid and slow to adapt”.
It is true. But also true was that Ramaphosa used the phrase “our movements” 12 times in his speech, while he said “government” just three.
Young people — and middle-aged and old people — don’t want a movement. They want a government.
Have your reunions. Celebrate your victories.
But then for God’s sake go home and give your people the governments you dreamed of so long ago.
For opinion and analysis consideration, email opinions@timeslive.co.za
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