No surprises as Ace plays the UIF card

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Tuesday.

Like many of my fellow South Africans, I’m shocked and surprised — or should that be visibly shocked — that we’ve made it this far into the week without President Cyril Ramaphosa appointing a retired judge to investigate the weekend earth tremor that shook Johannesburg and surroundings.

The head of state has also shown remarkable restraint in not appointing a minister of earthquakes in the wake of the early morning shake-up Gautengers were subjected to.

There’s not even been a minister in the presidency — or a presidential advisory council on earthquakes for that matter — introduced by the Government Communication and Information Service since Jozi first got shook.

It’s already Tuesday and there’s no dispatch of Bejani Chauke as an unpaid presidential envoy to the centre of the Earth; no proclamation gazetted; no further drain of the national fiscus to appoint somebody to fix that which is not fixable.

We are led.

Then again, Ramaphosa isn’t exactly known for his swift decision-making, so he may yet decide to be shocked and surprised and to throw a senior comrade — or a committee — at the problem.

There’s still time.

The former ANC secretary general, Ace Magashule, appeared to be neither shocked nor surprised when the governing party’s disciplinary committee announced his expulsion from the party on Monday.

Given that Magashule didn’t make any representations as to why the ANC shouldn’t expel him, his lack of shock and surprise is neither a shock nor a surprise — visible or otherwise.

Magashule probably had more pressing issues than expulsion on his mind with last Friday’s announcement by the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) that they were looking into the bursary programme run out of his office while he was premier of the Free State.

Not the way anyone would want to start their weekend, but again, Magashule would not have been surprised, given the notification of implicated persons process that comes with a SIU proclamation.

What is surprising is the speed of Magashule’s fall from grace; a swift, brutal relegation from the ANC’s premier league — and the secretary general’s office at Luthuli House — to the political bush leagues and beyond.

It’s taken the ANC way less than the five years Magashule predicted it would take his faction to regain control of the party way back in 2018, when he addressed the comrades in Durban and Pietermaritzburg on the fightback, to get rid of him.

Magashule’s first letter of suspension was issued by the ANC in March 2021, months after he was arrested in connection with the Free State asbestos scandal, with his final notice of expulsion going out in June 2023.

Two years, comrades.

One assumes that Magashule’s name will no longer be on a seat in the VIP area at the national Youth Day celebration at the Mangaung outdoor sports centre on Friday, given his excommunication from the broad church, as the ANC used to be known.

No blue light arrival.

No hugs and giggles in the holding room.

No seat at the VIP table for lunch.

Magashule will have to watch Deputy President Paul Mashatile give the keynote address from the extra strongs along with the punters whose municipalities — and lives — he ruined.

Or on the telly.

Perhaps Magashule will stay away on Friday and instead tread what is becoming something of a beaten path these days and head for the Economic Freedom Fighters commemoration in Durban instead.

Magashule is a bit long in the tooth to be fetching anybody’s ice, so the option of starting up his own party in the Free State may be the way forward — the criminal justice system permitting.

Magashule’s strategy of suspending his boss for suspending him was good for a laugh, an old-school barrack room lawyer’s stunt, but it was never going to work.

I tried something similar with a former editor I worked with a few years ago, jamming them up for trying to work me out of my job.

It made for some fun and games with the lahnee at the grievance hearing — and a payout — but in the end, it didn’t stop the Don’t Come Monday.

No Ace — just a UIF card.

At least the timing of the ANC secretariat’s study tour to China saved Magashule the added indignity of having secretary general Fikile Mbalula reading the statement about his expulsion from his old boardroom at Luthuli — live and direct on national television.

Things could have got out of hand: Mbalula cutting up Ace’s membership card for the cameras, setting it alight with a borrowed Bic, cackling maniacally and dropping the charred remnants into a metal rubbish bin as the flames begin to singe his fingers.

Small mercies, indeed.