JAUNDICED EYE
How galling to have to concede that our reviled former colonial masters can still teach us a thing or two. Specifically, what it means to take responsibility and act honourably.
A couple of months ago, Prime Minister David Cameron lost the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. He promptly resigned.
The result, he said, was not about the future of any single politician, least of all himself. It would be wrong for him “to be the captain to steer the country to its next destination”.
This week, Sam Allardyce, the bombastic and widely disliked manager of the England football team, was caught in a newspaper sting. The recently appointed Allardyce was recorded mocking his predecessor’s speech impediment and stating the obvious — that the Football Association’s “ridiculous” rules on transfers are easily circumvented.
This was a “significant error of judgement”, Allardyce subsequently admitted. He apologised and resigned on the turn, thus foregoing a multimillion pound pay package with nary a whimper.
Both men could have tried to ride out the storm. Neither did. They understood that they were accountable for their shortcomings and dutifully fell upon their swords.
It is not that the Brits are innately more honorable. Should they fail to behave in the manner that traditional mores decree, they would have ignonominy of being booted from office.
Compare this to our local soapie, starring the narcissistic and widely despised Hlaudi Motsoeneng, chief operating officer of the South African Broadcasting Corporation . This is a man who has clung to his job like a barnacle, despite a ceaseless four-year torrent of administrative, disciplinary and judicial findings that sequentially have decreed that he should not be in the job.
Last week, the Supreme Court rejected with costs Motsoeneng’s attempt to appeal the 2015 High Court ruling that had set aside as “irrational” his appointment as COO. The SABC board — as supine a collection of African National Congress lickspittles and arsecreepers as you could possibly imagine – promptly tried to circumvent the decision by appointing Motsoeneng to a different post.
The ANC purports to be outraged by this flagrant disregard of the spirit, if not the letter, of the judgment. The reappointment, says ANC parliamentary chief whip Jackson Mthembu, is unlawful, a violation of the court ruling.
“It is clear that this board is failing spectacularly to exercise its fiduciary obligation to steer the organisation.” The board should rescind its decision forthwith.
Mthembu then waxes splenetic about Motsoeneng’s newest appointment being the “the last straw that breaks the camel’s back”. Heads may roll, it is implied.
However, on this issue the ANC is less of a camel than it is a jackal. Not stolid and all-enduring but sly and devious.
After all, this is the same ANC that appointed these SABC lackeys who are so unstinting in their support of Moetseneng. And, after all, this is the same ANC whose Communication Minister Faith Muthmbi repeatedly has said that she has full faith in the SABC board and in Motsoeneng.
Faith she might well have, but clearly intelligence not so much, for it is her ministry that will carry the cost of the failed Supreme Court petition.
Politically, it’s all really simple. The precedents are ancient. The minister should the fire the SABC board, which is clearly not fit for purpose. And if the minister won’t fire the board, then President Jacob Zuma should fire the minister.
But this charade of one arm of the ANC slapping the wrist of the other is nothing new. It is symptomatic of the increasingly schizophrenic state of a political organisation adrift.
If further evidence were needed of its rudderless, ethically bereft state, it is provided by Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane’s written reply this week to a parliamentary question.
Zwane reiterated that he had not been speaking in his personal capacity when three weeks ago he announced that the Cabinet recommended that Zuma appoint a judicial inquiry to probe whether the banks acted had unfairly against the president’s cronies, the Gupta clan.
This is in direct contradiction to what Zuma said. At the time, the Presidency claimed that Zwane had issued the statement in his “personal capacity” and that its contents were not the government’s position.
So, who is untruthful? If Zwane is a serial liar – first when he issued the statement and now in Parliament – he should not only be fired as minister but as an MP. If the president is the one who is the liar, then he is of course the one honour-bound to resign.
Unfortunately, honour appears to be a colonial construct. For either man to resign would be alien behaviour. Well, alien to the ANC, if not to those imperialist relics Cameron and Allardyce.
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