Madness of a failed citizenry and their president

IT IS now history that President Jacob Zuma’s counsel, Kemp J Kemp’s attempt to keep the Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) hands and ears away from the spy tapes came to a dramatic end at the Supreme Court of Appeals last Friday.

Kemp had to concede to what most people with more than one brain cell already knew, that his client had no basis upon which to deprive the DA and the public of the right to know what exactly is on those tapes.

The president’s resistance to the DA’s application is totally unsurprising. It is part of a bizarre pattern swallowed whole by large sections of the population, where he has consistently and very energetically resisted attempts to produce documents and other evidence which would help him clear his name of the numerous graft charges he dubiously escaped in 2009.

The other is the encrypted fax allegedly sent from Mauritius to Schabir Shaik, his erstwhile former friend and financial “adviser” who offered and paid over to him much more money than any discernible financial advice. In the fax, the National Prosecuting Authority alleged, was a message referring to a bribe to be paid to the president. Since he insisted he was innocent many of us expected that the fax would instead say something different, and therefore he would have no problem if prosecutors laid their hands on it. Not a chance!

He went as far as travelling to Mauritius to impress upon the authorities there to refuse to send the fax here to assist in clearing his name. In numerous gatherings he addressed at the time he never stopped relying on his favourite two-trick escape game plan, conspiracy and victimhood. It is the conspiracy angle that the tapes fed, sending his allies and bystanders into a frenzy.

Quite why he would fight so hard to deny the entire country the opportunity to finally listen to the alleged conspirators plotting to smear him with charges he had nothing to do with remains a mystery, but it is not one he particularly worries about. He knows the country he leads generally fails at the basic task of citizenship, which is to link the dots between what politicians say or claim and what they do in order to ascertain whether they are lying to them or not.

The country is such as it is, and our politics smellier than rotten eggs precisely because we tend to believe anything we are told, including the pure fantasy of an allegedly innocent man withholding evidence that could exonerate him. The trend is so pervasive that when faced with uncomfortable facts that require us to think, we look for conspiracies which shall help us live with doing nothing to safeguard our democratic space, public resources and even the constitution.

Consequently no one will examine the astonishingly long losing streak built up by Kemp and his client as they attempt to use every legal loophole to forestall the day on which he may have to explain his dubious financial dealings with Shaik, for which he was convicted by the courts and sent to jail. His argument that this was a mere misunderstanding or political conspiracy has never held water, but he has used public finances to sustain it.

I do not think there will be a time in the future that he will be asked to repay us for this waste.

Instead what we will continue to have is the grotesque situation — an almost exclusively South African madness — where politicians use public resources to escape accountability to the public. In comparison, those who litigate to extract some accountability from the politicians have to go around, begging bowl in hand so they can pay for the expensive litigation.

It is easy to say this madness is a reflection on the president and whatever principles inform his irrationality but this would not be true.

Politicians are as good or bad as the people that put them on the pedestal of leadership and power.

If they are bad and there is no consequence for their evil, it is because the people like it to be so.

As a people on whose taxes the president has sustained his irrational litigation on a personal issue, we should not expect him to account for the immoral expenditure at his Nkandla home, or anything else he elects to do for that matter.

We shall instead do what we always do, which is to expend our energies on the distractions he will throw at us, like telling us he was the first person to ever get a bank mortgage bond to build a home in a rural area.

No country has ever succeeded in its objectives when its people were not actively engaged in public matters in an assertive, informed manner that curtailed whims of political power. South Africans want the best of everything but many have no idea how important accountability is in constructing a functioning, accountable state.

Zuma’s term in office may yet prove to be an object lesson in how not to be a citizen.