In the end Nene did his job — resigning will hurt commission

At the time of writing, Nhlanhla Nene is still finance minister. I hope he will still be by the time you read this. Nene is a loyal ANC cadre who wanted to do his job properly. But that implied a tortuous dissonance. What happened when those two ambitions could not be reconciled: when doing then president Jacob Zuma’s will was fundamentally at odds with doing one’s job?

In the case of Nene, we know the answer. When he was presented with a hastily drawn-up contract to tie the state to as much as a trillion rand of debt for the nuclear deal in 2015, he chose to do his job properly. He refused to sign. Of course, there are other cabinet members who went the other way in managing their own dissonant obligations. Nene was summarily dismissed, sparking an onslaught on the National Treasury. The price for doing one’s job was high.

Psychologists call it hindsight bias: the phenomenon of believing now that we were able to predict past events before they had occurred. While there were many who warned in 2009 about the deeply compromised Zuma becoming president, numerous others buried their doubts and tried to see the best in him. We forget that many inside the ANC and outside, who are now politicians and union leaders in opposition to him, were once praise singers for Zuma.

When he pushed forward the Guptas as champions of black empowerment, they took it at face value. When ministers and public servants were told to go and talk to the Guptas, they did. Msholozi believes in them, and he’s asked me to talk to them. Why shouldn’t I?

Nene is an honourable man, but in his efforts to be loyal to the leadership he met with the Guptas. In retrospect it is easy to judge him for that. It is clear now that there could be no innocent meeting, that they always had an agenda that was at odds with the interests of SA. By all accounts he did not agree to do anything for them, merely to satisfy his political leader’s requests to hear them out.

Thanks to the testimony of Mcebisi Jonas and Themba Maseko, we’ve heard about the Guptas at their extorting, threatening, malignant best, but the majority of their encounters with people were relatively benign. Indeed, I had several phone calls with Atul Gupta as a journalist several years ago, in which his tactic was obsequious flattery rather than bully-boy threats. I can see how Nene, instructed by Zuma, could have had six meetings with the Guptas involving relatively benign discussions.

But he did lie about them. Not when he was under oath, as he was last week, but when journalists asked him if he had met with them. The video clip of his denials in 2015 on eNCA after his dismissal is damning. That was a serious mistake. And it appears he lied not only to journalists but also to some of his closest political allies who were in the dark until last week.

Nene must have felt mortified about betraying them and the public. Indeed, his public apology on Friday reads like a resignation letter. But he did not go that far, convinced by some of those same allies (perhaps the president as well) that doing so would be a blow against undoing state capture. His apology might nevertheless be a sign of weakness and naiveté at a time when many knives are out for him.

Nene’s predicament was occasioned by the Zondo commission. I hope that there are many others who, like him, made mistakes but are still willing to come forward. If the repercussions for Nene are once again to find himself in the wilderness it will be a powerful disincentive for others who also felt torn between their loyalty to Zuma and doing the right thing.

Among Nene’s cabinet colleagues are many who managed the dissonance in a very different way. Men and women who put their loyalty to Zuma first and gave barely a second thought to what’s right.

In the cabinet are several who thought little of attending that Gupta Sun City wedding or other social occasions. Nene’s predecessor, Malusi Gigaba, was at many Gupta events. He arrived at the Treasury as finance minister last year with two Gupta advisers in tow. How did he manage the conflict of loyalty and integrity? That answer is clear.

Should Nene resign it would be bad for the Zondo commission, which should be a space for people to come clean without fear of damaging political consequences. It would be bad for the delicate process of re-establishing good governance against a host of bad actors. It would feed the EFF’s anti-Nene campaign, the motives for which I suspect have more to do with their links to tobacco tax dodgers and fraud at VBS Mutual Bank. And it would be disloyal to a man who has been through hell.

IF THE FINANCE MINISTER RESIGNS IT COULD DISCOURAGE OTHERS FROM TESTIFYING