Ramaphosa’s four lies of 2021’s apocalypse

As the year meanders to a close and the Chanukah candles start to flicker out, I can hear Fleetwood Mac’s hit song, “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies …” playing in the background. The music is a little dated, but the lesson is timeless.

When Barak Obama delivered the Nelson Mandela lecture at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg in 2018, he told the adoring audience, “All politicians lie, but the current president …” He didn’t need to finish the sentence; Donald Trump was still in office.

Sitting just behind Obama on the stage, as he delivered his lecture, was our current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, apparently eagerly taking notes.

We lap up lies because they make us feel a little better about ourselves. Yes, you don’t look fat in those pants and of course, I can’t wait to spend the holidays with your family. In 2021, our president perfected the art of lying.

Big Lie 1 – the world is punishing South Africa for our science

As the excited panel of South African scientists eagerly told the world about our discovery of the most mutated version of the COVID-19 virus, you could hear the doors of the world begin to swing shut in the background.

Said Ramaphosa, “The least we expected was to be punished by various countries about what we have disclosed very transparently.”

So convincing was the argument that the world was punishing us for our good science, that it was parroted on every social-media platform. My Instagram feed contained almost nothing other than stories of our victimhood.

Our community leaders and talk show hosts berated Israel for closing its borders to South African Jews who had been so supportive of the Jewish state in times of need and “is this how they repay us?”

Now, South Africa loves a good boycott, Miss South Africa participating in Miss Universe in Eilat is one case in point. Ironically, it was Israel that was the first country to trellidor its entrance to South Africans after the announcement of the yet to be named Omicron variant.

However, South Africa’s announcement of a new dominant, highly contagious strain of the COVID-19 virus posed an unknown and unquantifiable danger to the rest of the world.

Ramaphosa was playing politics not science. Asking the world to sacrifice the gains they had made in vaccination for the sake of tourism was just too much.

Much to his dismay, the world ignored him, opting rather to protect their own populations from our Omicron pandemic.

Big Lie 2 – it was the colonists, damn them!

When our president failed to convince the nations to open their flights and air terminals to us immediately, he defaulted to the standard hymn of the African National Congress – European colonists versus African victims.

His politics were undercut when fellow formerly colonised African countries Mauritius, Rwanda, Egypt, Morocco, and Angola joined the rest of the world in barring us from visiting. Ramaphosa’s visceral reaction was a sense of betrayal.

“We would like to have a discussion with them in a way where we would prefer that they do not react like our former colonisers, who are very quick to close Africa down,” said Ramaphosa.

But the countries who shunned us were in fact not our colonisers at all, they were Japan, Philippines, Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Chile, Malaysia, Bahrain, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and even our BRICS partners Russia and Brazil.

Alas, poor Cyril, our African siblings paid no heed, and decided that we shouldn’t have a holiday on the palm-frond beaches of the creole island of Mauritius.

Big Lie 3 – vaccine apartheid

Skipping the country on a little jaunt into West Africa, Ramaphosa was determined to continue to spread the narrative of victimhood.

Speaking in Senegal at the Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security, Ramaphosa said, “The greed that they demonstrated is something that is quite … The lives of people in Africa are just as important as the lives in Europe, in North America, and all over the world … This is the type of vaccine apartheid we say must come to an end, because the health of people around the world is at stake.”

European Council President Charles Michel euphemistically described Ramaphosa’s overly emotional outburst as “dramatic”.

Today, the world is awash with vaccines. By the end of the year, nearly 400 million doses would have been donated to Africa, 100 million by Europe, 50 million by the United States, 107 million by China, and 90 million by the Covax vaccine collective.

Most of these vaccines have simply just not found their way into people’s arms.

The better run African countries have achieved enormously high vaccination rates. By October 2021, Seychelles had vaccinated 72% of its total population, Mauritius 62%, Morocco 48%, and Tunisia 28%.

In comparison, at the same time, South Africa sat at a vaccination rate of 14% with 19 million dosages sitting unused in cold storage and a further 20 million diverted to other countries because we simply had no need for them.

Today, just less than 15 million South Africans are fully vaccinated out of an eligible cohort of 40 million people.

The problem isn’t vaccine apartheid, the problem is government’s failure to administer inoculations. In a world where words matter, accusing the West of “vaccine apartheid” seems more than dramatic, it seems wholly disingenuous.

Big Lie 4 – the 12 conspirators

The final big lie of 2021 was the president’s assertion that the eight days of violence and looting that destroyed the nation in July was the work of 12 agent provocateurs.

“We obviously as a government are extremely concerned at what happened here and we are doing everything to deal with it, and it’s quite clear that all these incidents of unrest and looting were instigated,” Ramaphosa said. Last week, Police minister Bheki Cele said that though police initially said 12 suspected instigators were behind the violence, the number had now increased to 19.

The identities of the conspirators remain a mystery. Arrests of an obscure politician and a radio DJ have revealed no masterminds and no grand plan. Although the violence in July was sparked by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma, the spree of looting that unfolded thereafter was neither planned nor anticipated.

Ordinary people saw the opportunity to steal because law and order had broken down, because an incapable state denuded by corruption, incompetence, and maladministration was unable to protect its own citizens. No imaginary dirty dozen or “N-n-n-n-nineteen” will explain the government’s wholesale failure.

But it’s “Dezember” as South Africans like to call it, it’s been a long, tough year, so I’m going to pour myself a brandy and Coke, put some Moishe’s boerewors on the braai, sit back, listen to the Christmas songs composed by some of the greatest Jewish song writers, and resolve, in 2022, to believe all the lies I’m told. That should make for a much easier year ahead.

• Howard Sackstein is the chairperson of the SA Jewish Report board.