TOM EATON: When things fall apart at home, try your luck as a peacemaker

Are you the despotic ruler of a broken empire with a plummeting population and rapidly dimming future? Have you started an unwinnable war that’s hastening the inevitable disintegration of your corrupt federation? Are you looking for a messenger who will do literally anything for money to hawk your detente-without-dishonour proposal around the shabbier embassies of the world? Then don’t delay! Call the ANC today! 

Of course, those weren’t exactly the words the ANC used as it revealed it had been approached by Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party to try to broker peace in Ukraine, but the gist was clear: having failed utterly at home, our governing party has decided to try its hand at international failure too.  

According to international relations subcommittee deputy chair Obed Bapela, the ANC has been given “four points” by Putin outlining “what it will take to end the war”, but he won’t say what these demands are. Perhaps they are diplomatically sensitive. Perhaps he doesn’t know what they are because the ANC’s fax machine only managed to print “Revolutionary heterosexual greetings, Comrades! The special military operation is obviously going brilliantly, but just in case it isn’t — which it is, by the way — I really need you to...” and then ran out of toner, and everyone at Luthuli House is too embarrassed to ask Moscow to send it again.  

Either way, anyone who has been following Moscow’s justifications since last year doesn’t need a smudged fax to get a general idea of how those demands might read: 

1. Ukraine must stop threatening Russia by provocatively having a border with Russia and flagrantly insisting that it is a separate country.  

2. If Russia agrees to end the special military operation, the international community must never again refer to Russia’s stated intentions to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine, which, given the huge amount of new and modern weaponry now in Ukraine, and the continued presence of the same government in Kyiv, headed by that infamous Jewish Nazi, Zelensky, could be spun by feminists and atheists to look like a total failure. There will also be no mention, ever, of the fact that a campaign to push Nato away from Russia’s border resulted in two countries joining Nato and doubling the length of its border with Russia, nor will anybody point out that a campaign designed to safeguard Russia’s future has caused 1-million people, many of them young and educated, to leave. 

3. Russia retains the right to insist that it would have completed this special military operation in 48 hours if certain formerly alive generals had allowed Comrade President Putin to carry out his master plan of riding into Kyiv on a bear with no saddle (bareback bearback) and destroying the enemy with a samurai sword whose blade was once dipped in the sweat of the patriot and greatest living actor, Steven Seagal.  

4. There is no Point 4 because of a shortage of petrol and breeding-age men.  

I’m exaggerating for comedic effect, of course: Seagal is only the second-greatest living actor, the greatest being PAC leader Mzwanele Nyhontso, who on Monday kept an absolutely straight face as he promised that the PAC knows how to end load-shedding “in less than 90 days”.  

But whatever the four points may be, and however absurd or arrogant the demands they contain might be, most senior members of the ANC will be feeling a flush of pride knowing that for a brief moment it once again struts and frets upon the world stage, or at least is led on from stage left in a pretty little harness, hops through a hoop, gives a cheerful bark, and is led off again.  

For those cadres who gathered over the weekend to plan the ANC’s election campaign, however, close contact with Russia will be more frustrating than inspiring. Indeed, as they sucked on their sausage rolls and gazed dully at a whiteboard, blank except for a doodle of Beyoncé by Fikile Mbalula and the prompt to “HAV GUD IDEAZ!”, many must have envied their counterparts in Russia, where you know the outcomes of elections while you brainstorm the campaign, not like in chaotic SA where democracy is still upsettingly legal.  

On Sunday, just before his government moved us back to indefinite stage 6 load-shedding, Mbalula tweeted four photos of him and his team hard at work. My first, extremely hostile thought was that I was seeing the lowest of the low — professional gas-lighters who know the ANC is killing SA but who still, even now, tell us that those fingers tightening around our throats are actually a lover’s caress.  

However, as I looked more closely at those pictures, I stopped seeing Machiavellian schemers. All I saw as I inspected the rows of mild-mannered nothings in their ANC caps and T-shirts, all urgently signalling their allegiance in the way conformists love telling everyone who they work for, was a ritual.  

It’s a ritual that’s fed them for almost 30 years. They don’t understand how it works, but they know it does: huddle around the laptops every five years, display the ANC flag on tables or caps or lanyards, and recite the magic words — “A better life for all!” and the money will keep appearing in your bank account every month for another five years.

If it doesn’t, well, you can always moonlight as Putin’s bellhop. 

• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.