TOM EATON: Who do kingmakers serve? Ultimately, only themselves
A kingmaker is not a ‘democracy-maker’, ‘consensus-finder’, ‘poverty-ender’ or ‘job-creator’.
Kingmaker. It’s a sexy word used to describe sexy people, transporting us into a wood-panelled, cigar-scented world in which Ralph Fiennes, Michael Fassbender and the sweary Scot from The Thick of It trade exquisite barbs over who should become the next minister of foreign affairs.
In SA, the word describes slightly less sexy people, unless your kink involves hypocrites in red overalls tweeting veiled threats to journalists.
The word, however, has retained its appeal: on Thursday it was in the headlines yet again, as an amaBhungane investigation hinted at dirty dealings in Johannesburg, where the local “kingmakers” allegedly made the DA an offer it couldn’t refuse.
Yes, we’ll be hearing about “kingmakers” for as long as creaking big parties need noisy and opportunistic small ones.
Which is why, I think, it might be useful to take a moment and look at the word itself. Not the political context. Not the current circus of fictitious Canadian bank accounts and media boycotts and all the other tedious performance of opposition politics. Let’s just look at the word, and, for perhaps the first time in years, think about what it’s saying, and how perfectly it describes current South African politics. The thing that strikes me first about the word “kingmaker” is all the words that it isn’t. It isn’t, for example, “democracy-maker”, or “consensus-finder”, or “poverty-ender” or “job-creator”. No. It’s “kingmaker”: a person or party who, through their actions or influence, cause a new king to be crowned. And what is a king? A king, throughout almost all of recorded history, is a person who is untouchable and unimpeachable. A king is God’s right had on Earth, with the power of life and death, and a divine right to do whatever he wants and to never have to explain his whim...
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