STRATEGY OF INCOMPETENCE
Ship of fools is part of president’s revenge
Revenge to Zuma isn’t driving a certain demographic into the sea but shoving his thumb in the nose of global expectations, writes Simon Lincoln Reader
Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Hypernormalisation, is his most unnerving yet. Beautifully produced, the film is just sequences of grainy, archived political encounters, the intention being to shatter the myths surrounding the origins of this generation’s most asymmetrical power centres. His conclusions are contentious, particularly on Donald Trump’s victory in the US, which he described as "part of a pantomime". Applying Curtis’s formula of history, the information age and economics to understand why President Jacob Zuma has wrecked the ANC with such apparent abandon dismantles two popular theories: the first that party factionalism is a new phenomenon and that Zuma has no political strategy. Long before 1994 there were two profiles competing for control of the ANC. The first was the Mells Park House negotiator — the urbane, sophisticated exile who was fundamentally reasonable. The second belonged to the group Zuma ultimately came to represent — who loathed the worldly kind and w...
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