Presidential Posing – Selfies with the Leader

Cyril Ramaphosa was sworn in as president of South Africa last week and it seems everyone is having this “Mandela” moment after he posed with ordinary citizens on the promenade in Sea Point.

 Yesterday he did a whole walk from Gugulethu to Athlone Stadium and everyone and their dog wanted a selfie with the leader.

 It all started with a woman who randomly came across him and had a picture taken which went viral. 

Everyone then started posting pics of them and the first citizen. 

Read: Former Durbanite tells of 'run-in' with President Cyril Ramaphosa

Ramaphosa also stopped to talk to some people at a shopping mall and in a picture taken of the meeting an old guy, known only as “Oom” was spotted in the background of the picture just standing there clutching his hands to his chest in some kind of prayer position with a look on his face indicating that he was absolutely enraptured by what he was seeing.

And so The Kiffness, which is some musician on social media, posted a meme in which he zoomed in on the old man looking longingly at the scene before him with the caption, “Find someone that looks at you the same way this “Oom” looks at Cyril”. To be perfectly honest, the old man looked like he was completely in love!

A few incarnations of that meme emerged with people reworking other people into it with funny captions and so the president posing for selfies with white people has become a viral thing on social media.

I think we are allowed to live in fantasyland for a bit. I mean we’ve had such a torrid time with President Zuma that people are all just latching on to this idealised, the-future’s-so bright, rainbow nation, let’s-all-love-each-other-now and my personal favourite: “he speaks so well”! It’s all over social media.

For me, the eternal cynic, it’s the kind of thing you hear all the time. Things like, “There’s this woman named Thandi who works in my office and, you know, she speaks so well!” It’s the same thing with the president. You hear things like, “You know Cyril (they don’t refer to him as the president) he’s so professional, he’s a billionaire and he speaks so well!” I mean, some girl who had moved to the United States, was even on social media saying that she had tears in her eyes when she watched the State of the Nation Address and she was coming back home to meet this new president.

The thing is: she was coming back home because her student visa had run out and she has no other choice – if it hadn’t she’d be staying on in the US. But also, to think that she’ll simply run into him at a local supermarket and fish out her cellphone, is a little deluded, but this is the fantasy that I’m talking about.

It seems like we’re all having a bit of a rainbow revival. And while I do believe that we need some positive energy, we don’t have the land back yet!

What we have is a whole lot of promises; first at the ANC elective conference and then later in the president’s State of the Nation address.

For me it’s a lot of talk at the moment and the president is obviously wooing people. Personally, I have just a little jaundiced view on things right now. It’s good that people are feeling positive about the country, but that’s only half the story, of course.

The other half of the story is: now we need to see change. We need to stamp out corruption, we need to have good governance, we need a trimmer, leaner, parliament and it needs to go beyond just words. The fact is: president Ramaphosa was there all the time during Jacob Zuma’s presidency. He faced several failed motions of no confidence over the course of nine years, so why didn’t Ramaphosa make his voice heard then? He was there all along.

Right now we’re enamoured. It’s like we’ve turned this massive tide, and maybe we have. Maybe we’ll look back a year from now and say it was everything we thought it would be – we’ve got rid of the corruption; we stamped it out, we got rid of all these people who had been bleeding us dry for the last twenty years and the country is happy again. But that’s unlikely. The system has been broken and that needs to be fixed first.

So are we right to be happy about our future because our president is posing for pictures on the promenade? And to be fair, the worst thing that could have happened for the DA and the other opposition parties was for Cyril Ramaphosa to be elected president and for Jacob Zuma to be fired. They pushed for it, but they held on to some kind of hope that they were going to win the next election because they believed they had an idiot in charge of the official government.

South Africans are bounce-back kind of people. We’ve had crap for nine years and all it takes is one posed picture on the beachfront with the president and it seems all that is forgotten – our world has turned a corner and we’re all happy. We’re quite resilient in that way, so that’s a positive thing. But we shouldn’t be naive. President Ramaphosa has made these promises. He has six months to a year to deliver. But I’m hoping the time has come for promises that we can actually deliver on.

Having said all this, I do believe that it was absolutely necessary that we had a presidential State of the Nation Address at last – one which inspired people. I mean he ended off so brilliantly with the quote from Bra Hugh Masekela. And I think it resonated with us all as South Africans.

You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @terencepillay1 and tweet him your thoughts.