JAUNDICED EYE

Parliamentary liars: Let the big guns settle it

Elevation to the upper echelons of government isn’t all caviar and champagne, Cuban cigars and blowjobs from interns. Or, in the South African context, Johnny Walker Blue and sushi nibbled from the tantalisingly taut tummies of swimsuit models.

Nor, as is the penchant of Britain’s Tories, a chilled Chablis and an underage poppet. Or poppers and rent boys, if you are a working-class hero, Labourite leader.

The truth is, all around the world, behind the dazzle of pomp and privilege, high office can be a dangerous business. Sometimes deadly.

The United States has lost four presidents to assassins and six narrowly escaped death. In some African and Latin American countries presidential rotation often concludes with the ceremonial hosing down of bloodstains from a bullet ridden wall.

North Korea is particularly prone to giving short shrift to those who fall from favour. The performance criteria are eccentric and arbitrary.

A top official was recently sent for re-education because of “an overbearing attitude”. And a fortnight ago, education vice premier Kim Yong Jin was caught “sitting with a bad attitude” in the national assembly.

Interrogation established that the man had anti-revolutionary tendencies and he was executed by a firing squad. Last year the defence chief, who had dozed off during an interminable meeting, was obliterated before a crowd of spectators, using an anti-aircraft battery.

It’s not only the bloodthirsty dictators who are dangerous. Recently, the Bolivian deputy interior minister was kidnapped by striking miners and bludgeoned to death.

But while there admittedly downsides for leadership elite of the western democracies being caught out, the punishments are at least predictably pedestrian. 

British parliamentary select committee chair, Labour’s Keith Vaz – affectionately known to very close friends as Vazeline – was last week exposed as having a penchant for East European male prostitutes and cocaine. He merely had to resign his chairmanship. The Home Affairs committee was investigating – yes, you guessed it – drugs and prostitution.

To South Africans, it is incomprehensible that snoozing in parliament or snogging in a brothel could be grounds for sanction. For in comparison with much of the world, the southern tip of Africa is a happy haven of tolerance.

For example, Blade Nzimande has been snoozing unperturbed as minister of higher education and training for seven years. As long as President Jacob Zuma has need of SACP representation in his cabinet, our dull Blade will continue to pass the buck on university funding and have oversight of the torching of campuses.

Zuma himself is no paragon of propriety. Like Silvio Berlusconi, who survived as Italy’s prime minister of Italy for nine years, despite numerous sexual peccadillos and corruption scandals, our president is the ultimate survivor. If he is given the boot before his second term of office expires, it won’t be because of perceptions of moral turpitude but of economic ineptitude.

So its not surprising that Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane is coasting along happily despite being caught telling perhaps the biggest, bald-faced lie by a serving African National Congress politician. And that’s an arena of Olympian scale rivalry.

Last week Zwane announced “a Cabinet resolution” for a judicial inquiry into the SA banking system. This followed April’s establishment of an inter-ministerial commission (IMC), under Zwane’s chairmanship, to “consider allegations that banks and financial institutions acted unilaterally and allegedly in collusion” in terminating services to Oakbay, the company owned by Zuma’s controversially influential cronies, the Gupta family.

Zwane is unambiguous. He says “a report of recommendations was tabled at cabinet. After discussion, the cabinet has now resolved…” Then follows the recommendation to Zuma that he appoints a judicial commission.

There is one bizarre portion: “Evidence indicated that all of the actions [by financial sector] were as a result of innuendo and potentially reckless media statements, and as a South African company, Oakbay had very little recourse to the law.” So the cabinet publicly makes known its belief that SA companies have “little recourse to the law”, despite a banking ombudsman, a Competition Commission, an independent judiciary, and a state-of-the-art Constitution?

Upon release of the IMC statement, the business and investment world, predictably to all but the Zuma-Gupta inner-circle, was aghast. In response, the Presidency quickly distanced itself from Zwane, saying that he had issued that statement in his personal capacity and that its contents were not the government’s position.

The conundrum is: If Zwane lied, why is he hasn’t been fired? The obvious conclusion is that Zwane did not lie. It’s the Presidency that is lying. 

Perhaps one can resolve this quandary of exactly who is the liar by drawing on the experience of the ANC’s old tjommie, North Korea. Does our military have a couple of spare anti-aircraft batteries to deploy for a High Noon duel? 

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