Ramaphosa courting trouble with Gigaba
HOME AFFAIRS … IS TOO IMPORTANT A DEPARTMENT TO BE LEFT TO SOMEONE WHO CANNOT BE RELIED ON TO TELL THE PUBLIC THE TRUTH
There’s an accident waiting to happen to President Cyril Ramaphosa, and if he doesn’t do something about it soon, he’s going to look either politically weak or morally indifferent. Or both.
The accident is called Malusi Gigaba, inexplicably retained in the Cabinet by Ramaphosa despite my explicit advice that he be dropped, if only for re-education and possible rehabilitation, a bit like those child soldiers you see in separatist armies around Africa.
What becomes of them? This child might have been, I suggested, groomed and recruited by the Zuma-Gupta state-capture conspiracy before his mind was fully formed. Should we not show him some mercy?
As it turns out, no. Our Malusi was a full and happy recruit. Maybe not at first, but at some stage he knew it all and stuck with it. We know he started the formal part of state capture with a cull of the board of big state-owned companies at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday June 8 2011. I still believe that was via instruction from above.
How would he have known Zola Tsotsi, his choice that day as Eskom chairman? Straight Gupta appointment, via Jacob Zuma, with Gigaba making the big announcement.
But by the time, two years later, when the Guptas had landed a privately chartered passenger plane at our top Air Force base for a wedding, you would have thought something might have clicked. Anyway, since my advice to Ramaphosa, Gigaba has fallen even further down the reputational ladder.
Just before Gigaba delivered his one and only budget as finance minister, the DA’s John Steenhuisen rose in the National Assembly to try to read what a high court judge had just said about Gigaba’s evidence in the matter of the Oppenheimer family’s Fireblade VIP terminal at OR Tambo International Airport, which Gigaba had first approved as home affairs minister and then, under pressure from the Guptas, tried to thwart.
“The minister deliberately told untruths under oath,” Judge Neil Tuchten said on February 21, in awarding the Oppenheimers the right to operate their terminal.
That echoed what Judge Sulet Potterill noted last October in the same case, when she called Gigaba’s evidence, among other things, “spurious” and “nonsensical and palpably untrue”.
What is wrong here? He once made me a sort of accomplice to a lie he told back in 2011, and I still can’t talk about it. But on Tuesday, he convened a media conference in Cape Town to deny that any of the Gupta brothers had South African passports. Within minutes, social media were all over him.
I clearly remember Atul Gupta more than once proudly proclaiming to me that he was a South African citizen and once offering to show me his passport, which he said he had with him. I wish I’d accepted.
Former ANC MP Vytjie Mentor quickly produced a perfect copy of the main page of Atul’s South African passport. Someone else dug up the fact that Atul was on the voters roll in Saxonwold, something impossible for a noncitizen. On Wednesday, Gigaba admitted he had got it all wrong.
But Home Affairs, to which he was returned in Ramaphosa’s first (interim) Cabinet, is too important a department to be left to someone who cannot be relied on to tell the public the truth. It is our nation’s gatekeeper and in wise and experienced hands it holds the key to our prosperity as a country by issuing 30-day visas to anyone not suspected of a crime or criminal intent at any of our borders.
Ramaphosa’s decision to return Gigaba to his former job is simply indefensible. The president can plausibly argue that he has to retain the president of the ANC Women’s League in his Cabinet. But for Gigaba, there is no excuse. And he will continue to embarrass Ramaphosa.
Charitable watchers of these games insist the president is simply allowing Gigaba to dig his own hole. I don’t know if that’s accurate. Yes, he will hope that the judicial commission on state capture will get rid of Gigaba for him, but that’s a risky way out because it calls your judgment into question. You can call my judgment into question, but the matter of the president’s judgment is a little more serious.
As it is, the head of the coming inquiry, Deputy Chief Justice Ray Zondo, announced his team on Wednesday and there’s little doubt it would eviscerate Gigaba. Former — and brilliant — auditorgeneral Terence Nombembe is to be its head of investigations, and an exceptional advocate, Paul Pretorius, is head of the legal team. Gigaba will not survive cross-examination in this forum.
I once referred to Gigaba in a column as a “useful Gupta idiot” and I really regret that. Personal insults are unprofessional in print. But he has an ordeal before him that no one but he can mitigate.
We all live complex lives, though I know “complexity” is no longer an excuse for anything in our new and narcissistic world. So there’s nowhere to hide, Malusi. Start telling the truth, from the start. Bury your pride. Stop lying.