Game is up and the laugh is on you now, Mr Former President
The first time I saw Jacob Zuma in a sports setting he giggled. It sounded very much like his gallows cackle on Wednesday night when he gave into the inevitable and skulked and sulked out of office.
It was October 2000 at the Paralympics in Sydney. Zuma, then deputy president, was visiting the Ekhaya centre, the hospitality area set up at the Novotel Hotel in Homebush, the closest hotel to the Olympic Stadium.
Those were the days when SA’s Olympic body had money or, if it didn’t, it had the clout to get a government department to pay for a place to entertain VIPs and to show off South African tourism.
For the Sydney Olympics, it rented a restaurant in Darling Harbour in the centre of the city for SA House. In Athens, it took over the Emmantina Hotel in Glyfada, the seaside suburb called the Hellenic Hamptons.
Millions were wasted at the South African hospitality venue for the Olympics in Beijing in 2008. A six-star hotel was booked, but the exhibition came to little, with accusations of money being frittered away.
The parliamentary monitoring group — under the auspices of chairman Butane Komphela, a man who once threatened to deport Tendai “Beast” Mtawarira for being a Zimbabwean and playing for the Boks — did a Jessie Duarte and blamed the media for the failure of the exhibition: “The exhibition presented by the department at the Beijing Olympics was discussed. It was felt that the media had used criticism of this exhibition in order to deflect attention away from the poor performance by South African athletes.
“There were mitigating factors such as problems with customs clearance and an unfortunate choice of venue. Much of the cost was for accommodation and other government departments had failed to arrive, resulting in wasted money.”
Why the media would deflect from the fact SA got just the one medal is baffling. But, then, so was Komphela. Last I heard he now works in the Free State as an MEC. There was a court case there on Thursday with links to Zuma. The Free State administration buildings will be an awkward place to hang out these days.
The South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc), which is the focus of an inquiry that has many squirming at Olympic House, set up base at a hotel in Kensington for the London Games. Media conferences with medal winners would be held there a day or two after the winners had won their medals.
It was a chance for the then sport minister, Fikile Mbalula, or Gert Oosthuizen, the zombie deputy sports minister with the National Party voice, to sit at the top table with the athletes.
Hospitality was pared down in 2012. I do not think there was a South African hospitality centre for Rio in 2016, but before the Games Gideon Sam, the president of Sascoc, was full of relief for a R70m contribution by the Lotto.
To better help the athletes? To bring home more medals? To make sport greater? Well, no: “We were beginning to panic, let me now reveal the truth — and I am happy that we can go to Rio, there was a doubt as to whether any of these board members would be going to Rio.”
Power and privilege. A first taste intrigues, the second tempts and after the third you are deep in the trough.
Sascoc has changed little since Beijing. Factions have formed, dismissals have been engineered, rules have been flouted and money wasted.
Through it all, athletes have been used and abused, praised when they bring the glory and discarded when they dare to speak up against.
It seemed like nothing would change and that the sludge at the top of our institutions would cling forever.
And then Wednesday night happened. Zuma giggled and then was, hopefully, done.
In 2000, he had giggled when he greeted an athlete who stuck out his arm, amputated below the elbow, for him to shake. Zuma asked a Paralympic team official what he should do. The answer was simple:“You should shake it.”
So he did, holding on to the stump of an arm. I walked away then. Seventeen years later, Zuma has walked away. He won’t be laughing any more.