SURVIVING President Jacob Zuma’s term in office is akin to surviving the London Blitz. Harsh? Well, maybe a little. There is an upside, however. Be patient, I’ll get to that.
But first let us look at the state of play.
And, for the purposes of this piece, let’s ignore the rot in the governing party that can be traced directly to Zuma’s putsch to power at Polokwane. We can even turn a blind eye to the chair-throwing antics at the African National Congress Youth League congress in the Eastern Cape this weekend, the seeds of which were sown by the likes of Julius Malema during his "we’ll kill for Zuma" phase.
We can also ignore the fracturing of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the tripartite alliance.
Zuma, and his bloated Cabinet, has presided over the collapse, and the near-collapse, of multiple institutions and state-owned enterprises, and economic stagnation. His next state of the nation speech should be titled: privatisation as a consequence of state ineptitude. Under Zuma, Eskom is struggling to keep the lights on and will pretty soon need to be recapitalised.
Our Post Office is ready to be read the last rights and be given a pauper’s burial; our flag-carrier, South African Airways, has been on life-support longer than the late Ariel Sharon (it is desperately seeking an equity partner and a permanent CEO); the National Prosecuting Authority resembles a crime scene — a headless body that has suffered serious blunt-force trauma abandoned and forgotten on the side of the road.
The South African Revenue Service is fighting espionage battles that have nothing to do with its mandate; Parliament has been reduced to a circus; the police are losing the fight against crime and desperate citizens are even willing to forgive Bheki "Shoot to Kill" Cele for those dodgy lease deals.
But there’s an upside. Truly.
When we do make it out of Zuma’s presidency, we may feel as giddy as survivors of the London Blitz.
In his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits And The Art Of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell writes: "In the fall of 1940 … German bombers thundered across the skies above London, dropping tens of thousands of high-explosive bombs and more than million incendiary devices.
"It was everything the British government officials had feared — except that every one of their predictions about how Londoners would react turned out to be wrong. The panic never came."
British military command had issued a report that a sustained bombing of London would lead to chaos. That workers would refuse to go to work, millions of Londoners would flee to the countryside, industrial production would grind to a halt and the army would be tied up keeping order among panicked citizens.
They built psychiatric hospitals on the outskirts of London to deal with a "flood of psychological casualties".
But the panic never came. The psychiatric hospitals stood empty and were taken over by the military instead.
In the book, a psychiatrist recalled driving through southeast London, when "the siren blew its warning and … a nun seized the hand of a child she was escorting and hurried on. She and I seemed to be the only ones who had heard the warning. Small boys continued to play all over the pavements, shoppers went on haggling, a policeman directed traffic in majestic boredom and bicyclists defied death and the traffic laws. No one … even looked into the sky."
Gladwell quotes a Canadian psychiatrist as positing that bombing put Londoners into three categories: those who died, near misses (they feel the blast, see the destruction, are wounded perhaps, and are horrified and shocked) and remote misses (they heard the sirens, but the bombs fell down the street or the next block over).
The remote misses have a strange reaction to a bombing attack. "A feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability…. A near miss leaves you traumatised. A remote miss makes you think you are invincible."
They stayed. They worked. They rebuilt.
I think we’re much like those Londoners during the Blitz. Many of us are directly affected by the ineptitude and failings of the state under Zuma — direct hits and near misses. Traumatised and trampled.
Many of us, insulated by our relative wealth, are not and sit in the remote-miss category. Water shortages and electricity blackouts have become the subject of wry humour. The entirety of Zuma’s term will no doubt feel like a really close shave. But, like the Blitz, it will pass.
In London, cyclists continue to "defy death and the traffic laws".
• Meintjies is Times Media Group’s foreign correspondent and bureau chief in London.
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