Rather be dead than cool, said the Nirvana frontman. He is now both dead cool. While Cobain’s koan remains excellent advice for a rock star, the opposite is true for a politician.
Let’s recall Cyril Ramaphosa’s honeymoon charm offensive, back in the early days of the First New Dawn, when he jogged with people named Chad on the Sea Point Promenade, and did the all-time classic “reformer” photo op: a short-haul economy class flight with the hoi polloi. (Former president Jacob Zuma pulled the same trick, perhaps hoping that the courts would be more lenient if he flew nearer the rear toilets. They weren’t.
) Indeed, Ramaphosa’s late 2017/early 2018 ascension so upended politics in South Africa that the opposition was in near complete disarray, and the cool kids — namely, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) — entirely lost their chill. There has over the years been much discussion over what exactly happened to the party, almost all of it as hilariously overblown as the EFF itself. But there’s no question that they hit the Ramaphosa wall with their airbags failing to deploy.
As a result, they ran around the political arena screeching wildly for a medic. This was inexcusable for two reasons. First, it’s uncool to be uncool, as the EFF’s Central Command Team full of photogenic bad boys should intrinsically know.
And second, in March 2019, the EFF won the most significant victory of its then five-year history: it forced the hand of the ANC, which voted for an EF.
