Fortuner from the wrong party is unlucky
AMID ALL THE NOISE, IT IS EASY TO FORGET TO ASK: IS THAT IT? A SPONSORED FORTUNER, AND MAYBE A RENTAL IN THE BURBS?
When you have decided to make it your life’s work to swim with sharks, is it wise, shortly before you dive in, to allow someone to massage you with fish guts and human blood? I don’t know. Clearly Mmusi Maimane doesn’t either.
As great whites (and some much less impressive whites) begin to circle, following the trail of political lifeblood seeping out of the hole in Maimane’s reputation, his supporters are treading water hard. If he accepted a car sponsored by Steinhoff, they insist, it was before anyone knew that Steinhoff was crooked, and besides, it wasn’t a personal gift but more of a general freebie tossed into the communal DA pool of goodies.
They’re fair comments but they ignore the bleeding elephant seal in the room: Maimane has built an entire brand, both for himself and his party, that insists he and it are more virtuous than SA’s other political parties — where predators have blurred the line between politics and patronage. Private, mutual back-scratching, the DA endlessly insists, is the preserve of the ANC, not the sleaze-busting champions of righteousness in blue.
Which is why one might have thought that a veteran of the churning, scarlet waters of back-room dealings might have taken special care to protect himself from even a whiff of impropriety.
There are two reasons why a large corporation would donate money to a political party. The first is that they are champions of democracy and like the party leader’s smile. The second is that they are investing in their own futures, getting a strategic foot in the door that might allow them, one day, to discuss (in gentlemanly ways, of course) the question of quid pro quo.
If Maimane thinks Steinhoff sponsored his car for the first reason, then he is too naive to hold an ice-cream cone let alone office, and should retire now. If he understands that it was for the second reason, and still decided it was a good idea to use some of that largesse in his personal capacity — a car, after all, is not an amorphous flyer campaign or party website
— then he is either too stupid or too arrogant to hold office and should et cetera.
But of course, that was the plan. The DA is scrambling to get its timelines right as it goes into the interrogation room, but whomever you believe, it seems at least some people in the party knew about Maimane’s car (and his mysteriously fuzzy second home in Cape Town) but waited until the current leadership fight to leak their information to the press. In other words, this is just the latest round of bitter recrimination in the DA’s continuing divorce from itself.
In May it tried a trial separation — a large chunk of itself moved out and went to live with the FF+ — but the differences between the right and the left of the party remain irreconcilable, with both groups saying the other never really loved them. The end is coming, and these carefully timed revelations are simply a set of grainy photographs slapped down on the table by a private detective, along with a new demand for the beach house and both the Picassos.
It is easy to be drawn into the salacious details of this marital implosion. The DA’s opponents have roared with delight, and Maimane’s religious activities are being widely mocked as the hypocritical posturing of a false prophet. Amid all the noise, it is easy to forget to ask one important question: is that it? A sponsored Fortuner, and maybe a rental in the burbs?
That question is not a defence of Maimane. Agreeing to drive the car himself was profoundly dim-witted. If the allegations made in the Sunday press are true — that he hung on to it even after Steinhoff’s corruption was revealed — then he’s either unteachable or a sociopath.
But if he is ditched and donations play a part in his ousting, we will have to acknowledge, however much one might dislike the DA and its sanctimony, that it is held to a profoundly different standard than its competition.
If a sponsored car is enough to remove the leader of the opposition from office, but the theft of R1-trillion can’t budge the ANC from power, or, indeed the looting of VBS bounces right off the EFF, then truly our different parties are separated not by ideology but by lightyears. They are separate universes.
That will be hard for Maimane to stomach. Then again, he will also be familiar with the bit in Galatians about reaping what you sow. If you spend a decade insisting that any and all manifestations of patronage require harsh consequences, you can’t really be surprised when people believe you.