Opposition politics: The worst job in the world?

I feel that I haven’t engaged in my favourite pastime in the world in a while; oversimplifying complex matters I don’t fully understand. I feel that I owe myself the indulgence. It’s a Friday, after all.

I saw a guy driving a funeral parlour van the other day and thought to myself: “What a crappy job this guy has.” Think about it; he waits around for people to die, otherwise he starves and, well, becomes his own client. Makes you wonder about the kind of moral dilemma a funeral director has when he’s the first person on the scene of an accident. That got me thinking about some jobs I’d turn down irrespective of money being offered. Eugene Terre’Blanche’s PR oke, Osama Bin Laden’s travel agent and Bafana Bafana coach come to mind.

And then I read Sheila Camerer’s post on the Judicial Service Commission’s decision on Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe. I must confess that I couldn’t read two sentences in a row without giggling. Allow me to explain my retarded reasoning for why I found this article from my fellow Thought Leader hilarious.

I truly believe that Helen Zille and co might just have the crappiest job in the country — worse than the “I wish more people would die” fellow I mentioned up there. Think about it. Forget the detail; her job is to oppose. She wouldn’t be too much of an opposition leader if she didn’t walk around looking for stuff to oppose.

You work hard all your life until you are in a position to ascend to the top position in your ~~street gang~~ political party. By sheer rotten luck, the electorate seems to think that your policies are … well, crap and you end up being the opposition. So now you’ve stabbed a few comrades in the back, perhaps, and made a few unholy alliances with bald, fat guys and shook many clammy hands to ascend to the position. What next? Well, now you’re like the funeral director walking around, snooping around and keeping your ear to the ground for the sound of screeching tyres and the sweet sound of metal making contact with metal and souls ascending to heaven.

Kinda makes you wonder if this conversation ever takes place at the Union Buildings between Mbeki and his advisers:

Mbeki: OK, so how do I go about getting rid of Selebi without making him think I’ve turned on him?

Netshitenzhe: Well, I’d start by firing Pikoli personally.

Mbeki: How would that work? I thought Pikoli was all for charging Selebi.

Netshitenzhe: True. But this way, Helen, Patricia and Bantu will be all up in arms and you can use the momentum of their righteous opposition to say to Jackie: “There’s too much heat. I have let you go.”

Mbeki: You’re a genius, Joel. I want you to be my remotely controlled president when I win in Limpopo.

If you think such a conversation would never take place, then you suffer from an advanced case of gullibility. If I were the president, I’d use this trick all the time. I’d threaten to send Lekota’s boys into Zimbabwe to force a regime change, wait for the opposition to get on their high horses and then do my quiet diplomacy thing: “I can’t send the Rooivalks in? Oh, OK — speak up then coz otherwise Mugabe is toast.”

So what of the Sheila Camerer article then? I think that Zille, Sheila and co do not like Justice Hlophe too much, for whatever reason. I’m not even certain who struck the first blow. All I know is that many a nose has been bloodied in Western Cape skirmishes since Hlophe was appointed to the presidency of the Cape High Court.

Hlophe has made many utterances and took many decisions that have pissed off the judicial establishment in that part of the world. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, do your own Googling, forchrissakes.

I think that’s the true motivation for the harangue from Camerer’s DA. They thought they had Hlophe by the gonads when he was found with his hand in the gravy jar. And the wretched Judicial Service Commission had to go and screw it all up by giving Hlophe a slap on the wrist.

I wrote about the joys of righteous indignation in my last post. Righteous indignation is probably the greatest weapon the opposition has in its arsenal. And, man oh man, did Camerer dig deep into her self-righteousness reserves in her article. As I bit into that article, the righteousness was dripping from my chin. I couldn’t help but giggle my behind off. I’ve been there.

In the event that you’re one of those people who cannot sift through politicians’ double-speak and big words, allow me. I have an excellent BS filter. This is what Camerer had to say:

1. Justice Hlophe is an a-hole — and he has gravy smears on his hands.
2. The JSC didn’t go far enough and … somebody’s got to do something.
3. Oh, if only the coming Judicial Service Amendment Bill had already been passed, then we’d have fixed the uppity a-hole.

There are some gems in that article. My favourite is “The JSC’s decision was a slap on the wrist for Hlophe, albeit a severe one.” Tee hee hee! You see, I think that, at this point, she was a bit conflicted — she wanted to convey her disapproval at the light sentence but stick out her tongue at Hlophe. “Ha ha! They said you displayed bad judgement, Mr Big Shot Judge. Neeny neeny neener! We win, you lose.”

These are the pitfalls of opposition politics. I have to wonder if Camerer ever considered the implications of coming out guns blazing in condemnation of the JSC, the body that is constitutionally empowered to make these rulings in judicial matters.

As I pointed out to a Thought Leader reader who had also been wound up to a high state of righteous indignant frenzy by Camerer’s officious article: consider this hypothetical scenario. What if, after the Constitutional Court decision on the Masetlha matter, the president had written one of his famous weekly blogs questioning the wisdom of the judges who had found that the axing was a violation? If you started giving me a lecture on the differences between the JSC’s ruling and a court decision, I’d tell you to get a life and stop nitpicking. I’m talking about the principle here.

I’m not a betting man, but I’ll bet you there would have been much noise about interference with the independence of the judiciary. As I understand it, the JSC is made up of a minister, this country’s chief justice, some other guys in wigs and frocks, MPs (some from opposition parties), advocates, attorneys, members of the NCOP and so forth. These are the folk who scrutinised the facts and made a ruling in their collective wisdom. To the first person to say “But there were dissenting voices …”, please grow up.

There has been much noise about us going the way of Zim lately. That ominous warning sends shivers up my spine. I don’t want to wake up one morning to find a short, angry guy with a Hitler moustache at the Union Buildings. When we start throwing our toys out the cot because constitutional bodies make decisions we don’t like, I get nervous. I was under the (mistaken?) impression that our judiciary had institutional as well as decisional independence. Yeah, yeah, the JSC is not a court of law; please don’t change the subject. Be that as it may, I sure hope the JSC has some decisional independence, free of influence from Thought Leader bloggers and career politicians.

The fact is, I would have liked that oke who threw a human being into a lion’s den to have been hung up by his gonads on Mary Fitzgerald Square. As it turns out, he’ll be watching Noot vir Noot at my expense for not much more than five years, possibly. You don’t see me writing about slaps on the wrist that are also severe at the same time.

(I look forward to all the emails accusing me of saying that Hlophe is innocent and that Mugabe is Hitler.)

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