TOM EATON: From Russia with Love for Referendums: ANC plan to take Western Cape
A sham here might just work, if it can find the right autocrat to annex the foreigners’ oxygen
As the ANC Youth League coos and gurgles from the baby seat as it’s driven through Donbas to rubber-stamp Vladimir Putin’s sham referendums, and a growing number of South Africans start to wonder if autocracy might be a better option than democracy, we seem suddenly to be awash in the politics of small, crude Big Men.
I suppose this shouldn’t surprise anyone. We have precious little experience of democracy in this country, and even less of the sort of messy, noisy activism required to keep it healthy. Yes, we vote every five years, and we talk a great game about freedom and George Orwell (who apparently wrote a book in 1984 called Sheeple Farm, featuring a naughty pig, unless I’m thinking about Babe?), but scratch the surface and you’ll often find a yearning to regress to the eternal infancy offered by autocracy, where an infallible parent relieves you of the burden of having to have your own thoughts or be responsible for your own actions...
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