Zuma is undermining the fine art of the political lie

I grew up listening to the fictions of the Nats and, by God, those hillbillies had the gift of the grift. South Africa's military could napalm a foreign country, have photos of said napalm splashed on international front pages, get condemned by the UN, and what would happen? Pik Botha would appear on the SABC to explain that we had misunderstood.

He didn't tell us we'd taken it out of context. He didn't claim that news reports had been fabricated by enemies of the state. He'd simply nod knowingly, take his sexy hot-chocolate voice down an octave, and reassure us that the world was a confusing place and that it's easy to get confused and not understand complex adult issues. By the end of his earnest sermon, the volk had forgotten all about war crimes and had gone back to sleep with a vague sense that a Sunday school picnic had gone awry but that a kind oomie had arrived just in time to make sure the ants didn't crawl into the Redro.

When democracy came to South Africa, and the world and its spin-doctors opened up to us, we assumed this tradition would continue and even flourish. As arms dealers and corporate predators swarmed towards Nelson Mandela's government, we believed that now, at last, we would finally get the lies we deserved: beautiful, gleaming things crafted by the greatest propagandists our taxes could buy.

For a few years the new government delivered on that promise and we were treated to a couple of masterful smoke screens.

Consider Sarafina 2, the new South Africa's inaugural corruption scandal. Do you remember who was to blame and who got punished? No? Job done. If you have to Google a scandal to recall its details, then excellent liars have delivered some primo perjury and awesome obfuscation.

Sadly, however, the early promise soon faded. The Arms Deal presented Thabo Mbeki with a wonderful opportunity to cook up some presidency-defining perfidy (for example, faintly sabre-rattling stuff about South Africa needing to step up to its rightful place as the biggest, baddest nation in Africa; of walking quietly and carrying a big stick; of maybe needing to invade Lesotho again, but what did he do?

Instead of being tastefully aggressive, he went defensive and told us we needed Swedish fighter jets to keep us safe, presumably from Botswana's air force of three crop-dusters and Zimbabwe's squadron of kamikaze weather balloons. Soon even the explanations dried up, replaced by terse denials and then accusations of racism, counter-revolution and disloyalty.