Sars IT chief a symptom of Zuma’s toxic racial brew
Iwas in the gallery at the Nugent commission on that dreadful morning of October 17 when SA Revenue Service (Sars) IT head Mmamathe Makhekhe-Mokhuane testified. As she began to speak, a feeling of hollowness invaded the gallery: it was not just me; it infected everyone. As she went on, one awful hour after the next, the hollowness was replaced by excruciating discomfort. By the time the hearing broke for lunch, members of the audience could barely look one another in the eye.
It was not until this moment that the full horror of what Jacob Zuma had done to SA came home to me. I don’t just mean what he has done to state institutions the deliberate and calculated project to destroy the basic machinery of government. I mean what he has done to what happens inside our heads.
Here was a woman running one of the most important pieces of the bureaucracy infrastructure that makes it possible for the revenue service to collect duties and taxes. And she displayed a cocktail of qualities that would be hard to dream up in a nightmare.
She was not just incompetent, but staggeringly so; when asked about her strategic vision for the future of IT at Sars, she prattled on about creating rooms for mothers to express milk. She had not just the drifted from the reality of what was happening in the hearing, she had drifted way out to sea. When the evidence leader pointed out that she had missed most of her departmental meetings, she denied the evidence, even though it had been furnished by her office.
The shock that swept through the gallery soon gave way to shame and discomfort, and it was not just because this was a senior bureaucrat in a position of vital importance; it was because she was a black woman. The malign force of generations of history were coursing through her and through everyone in the room the history that insists technocratic prowess belongs to white men.
That is why people found it so hard to look one another in the eye; a long, deep history of prejudice, one that has conjured so much arrogance, so much shame and so much self-doubt, was playing out before us. That is one of the cardinal crimes Zuma has committed. It is he and his lieutenant, Tom Moyane, who wanted the likes of Makhekhe-Mokhuane in key positions. They wanted her there because people who don’t know what’s going on don’t get in the way. And if the useful idiot is a black woman, then so be it.
The depth of Zuma’s cynicism is hard to fathom. Among the legacies of his presidency is a toxic racial discourse. He has stirred up the crudest black nationalism. And yet the theatre that unfolded at the Sars commission on October 17 could barely have been conjured up by the most rabid white supremacist. And the director of the show was Zuma. He is, in every sense, the opposite of what he claims to be.
Holding up a banner of black upliftment, he is for black poverty. Promising to herald black empowerment, he has done more to stifle black excellence than most.
The irony is that we are in fact living in an epoch of rising female confidence. If those who died a quarter of a century ago could be brought back from the dead, I bet the most stunning change they would observe is the unprecedented assertiveness of black women. From Redi Tlhabi on the radio to Sisonke Msimang on the printed page, we are witnessing something very important and largely new.
One can only pray that in time Zuma will be remembered as an aberration: as a malignant spirit who momentarily brought to the surface a rotten and fetid little corner of our collective unconscious. I fear, though, that this is too hopeful. The poison he has spewed is in SA’s bloodstream and will course through its veins for some time to come.