Shocking security warning
“HOW Ramaphosa turned a young mother into his personal porn star.” This was a screaming headline from the Weekly Xpose, a propaganda news site by socialite Kenny Kunene, who has emerged as one of the key players in the smear campaign against Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Attached to the “expose” were also e-mails of a personal nature, which the site claimed were part of the correspondence between Ramaphosa and one of his mistresses.
The sensational story followed a dull version first published in the Sunday Independent which claimed that Ramaphosa was a philandering sugar daddy – a far cry from the image of morality he portrayed on his presidential campaign trail.
While admitting to an affair which he says ended eight years ago, Ramaphosa has dismissed the rest of the claims as an orchestrated move to prevent him from ascending to the ANC’s highest seat of power.
He says it is all part of a wider campaign to discredit those, like him, who have taken a stand against state capture and the looting of public resources.
Without saying so explicitly, he clearly believes that the Zuma faction is behind the leaks.
As you know, Ramaphosa is not the first, nor the last politician to be embroiled in a sex scandal.
Although it is hard to predict with a degree of certainty what may happen in the months leading up to the ANC’s elective conference in December, what these allegations indicate for sure is that the fight for the ANC’s throne will only get messier.
Even so, these allegations are unlikely to hurt Ramaphosa’s campaign.
The reason for this is simple.
His supporters don’t care who he sleeps with.
For that matter, nor do many ordinary South Africans – men and women.
Many did not care when Jacob Zuma stepped out on his wives and fathered a child with Sonono Khoza.
They did not care when cabinet ministers Fikile Mbalula, Malusi Gigaba and Jeff Radebe and trade unionist Zwelinzima Vavi were all caught with their pants down.
Right or wrong, in this country we do not generally measure the personal conduct of politicians against a moral compass to which they ought to be held.
There is, of course, something to be said about this, especially for a nation where reckless sexual behaviour has had far-reaching, multi-general health and economic consequences.
But perhaps it is precisely because so many of us live messy lives that we “allow” politicians to get away with fooling around.
Infidelity is so much a part of our national psyche it is normalised, even romanticised in some corners of our society. Crazy, right? Further, in the context of leadership, there appears to be a popular belief that being unfaithful to one’s spouse may not, in itself, necessarily mean one is also susceptible to corruption.
In other words, being a lying, cheating husband or wife may not necessarily mean that one will be a thieving or incompetent president.
To some, these are two very different sets of values.
To be honest, it’s a never-ending debate which does not interest me as much as the bigger issue at play in the Ramaphosa matter – that of the integrity of our intelligence community.
In his response to the accusations, Ramaphosa suggested that state intelligence operatives had hacked his private e-mails.
“It is evident that there is a well-resourced‚ coordinated covert operation underway to prevent those responsible for wrongdoing from being held to account, and for the integrity of our law enforcement agencies and other state institutions to be restored,” he said in a statement.
“This operation appears to have access to resources within intelligence circles with the capability to intercept communications and hack private e-mails.
“We now need to confront the likelihood that state agencies and resources are being abused to promote factional political agendas,” he said.
Granted, this could be just a man trying to deflect attention from his womanising ways.
However, we should not ignore a startling claim by a sitting deputy president that our country’s intelligence machinery is rogue. Yet, for the most part this week, we did.
His claim hardly induced the kind of public outrage it ought to have, in my view.
Perhaps the gravity of the claim was lost in the alleged sordid details of his love life.
Or even worse, we are so used to the abuse of state institutions for nefarious political battles that, to an extent, we became desensitised to the potential implications thereof.
After all, we have seen this too many times before.
The last two decades (and before) are littered with bogus intelligence reports or other works cooked up to serve the narrow interest of a dominant political faction of the ruling party.
These intelligence works are often predictable and similar in nature – a cocktail of lies, intrigue and a sprinkle of truth just enough to create doubt in the public eye.
They are birthed from a sick cloak-and-dagger underworld that shapes so much of our reality.
It is a world that, if allowed, will destroy the credibility of our state institutions and surrender our security to a dangerous criminal network.
This is why Ramaphosa’s claim must not be ignored.