The more our politics fragment, the more comfortable I get. Watching the final post-local government election coalition talks play out has been quite astonishing. EFF supporters are convinced Julius Malema has played a blinder and will be pulling municipal budget strings all over SA. Others see the cool hand of DA supremo Helen Zille snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
The only certainty is that the ANC has been handed a snotklap of note, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people. In just over a year the ANC will elect a new leader. Can President Cyril Ramaphosa survive this? Is it time for a managed exit?
Had former president Thabo Mbeki properly read the room early in 2007 he would have left it for someone else to oppose Jacob Zuma, whose victory that December was fundamentally driven by a swing of votes against Mbeki.
For the moment the election of DA mayors in Johannesburg, Tshwane, Mogale City and Ekurhuleni is simply breathtaking. And it is not the case that they are trapped by the EFF.
You could as easily argue that the EFF is trapped by the votes it cast for the DA mayors because, with a view towards a general election in 2024, Malema cannot flip-fop too much. He also has to be careful. If the DA is turfed out of office for some (probably inevitable) infringement, it would go quietly and campaign in 2024 on the EFF being ANC enablers.
Or something like that. What has happened with these non-coalition “arrangements” is not black and white. Stories will play out everywhere. No-one underestimates Malema's gift for politics and no-one should underestimate Zille either.
But watch Herman Mashaba. He slipped the trap of being mayor of a collapsing city and is now free to start a 2024 campaign immediately. I don't like his position on immigrants, and his insourcing of labour when he was DA mayor of Johannesburg four years ago was cynical politics when he should have been encouraging enterprise.
But if he gets some financial help to begin a campaign, then here's a conservative African family man, a successful businessman and former chair of the Free Market Foundation who could turn our politics on its head. A lot of people choke at the thought of a President Mashaba, but it isn't as far-fetched as they might imagine.
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Could somebody please take Tulio de Oliveira's cellphone away from him and lock him in the lab? Our quite brilliant genome-sequencer-in-chief took to Twitter on Thursday after checking out the B.1.1.529 coronavirus variant for two days and, without waiting for the World Health Organisation to do its job, himself declared it “a variant of great concern”.
Could somebody please take Tulio de Oliveira's cellphone away from him and lock him in the lab?
— Peter Bruce
Then he went really wild: “I would like to plea to all billionaires in this world @elonmusk @BillGates @JeffBezos @DrPatSoonShiong @WarrenBuffet to support Africa & South Africa financially to control and extinguish variants! By protecting its poor and oppressed population we will protect the world.”
He leaves out the 70 dollar billionaires in the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, but within minutes world markets began to crash and we and our neighbours are back on the UK's travel-ban list. That's the summer season gone. More poor and oppressed I'm afraid, Tulio. I hope this time we respond robustly and prevent UK flights landing here until they lift their ban. Maybe it's bad, maybe not. We don't know yet, do we?
The University of London's professor Francois Balloux, one of the safest pair of hands in the Covid crisis, has his doubts. A variant as complicated as the one De Oliveira was describing must have been in circulation for more than just a few weeks, he said on Friday. And travel bans will be useless. “The horse,” he said, “has bolted.”
In the meantime, the government should begin imposing vaccination mandates for anyone using public services and facilities and stop complaining about rich countries hoarding vaccines when we have run out of people to give them to. A booster programme starting next week would seem appropriate for vulnerable people. There are a lot of them.
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Apropos last week's column on Shell's planned Wild Coast seismic mapping and the danger it poses to marine life, I've since learnt that even though sound does travel farther in water, it's not louder. So the 260-decibel air-gun explosions Shell will make in the water along the Transkei coast every 10 seconds for four months would be the equivalent of about 195 decibels to the human ear on a beach. Still, a mere 190 decibels will explode your lungs. And 165 decibels will shatter your eardrums. They are still going to end a lot of life out there.
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