Badih by name, but Chaaban is no ally for any politician

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 18

P2015 OLITICAL comedy line of the week was Badih Chaaban saying he was quitting politics because he couldn’t work with thieves. This from a man linked with Yuri “The Russian” Ulianitski and Cyril Beeka and, for whom, a basic Google search throws up words like triads, mafia and brothels.

The serial troublemaker has given up his attempt to become mayor of Witzenberg (that’s the Ceres/Tulbagh area for those who don’t know the strange code of our hinterland demarcations) and stormed off into the sunset with an obscenity-laced resignation letter.

Now I like my politicians colourful rather than bland, and am prepared to cut a lot of slack in that regard, but Chaaban always took that notion too far.

His life is full of incidents that, in a saner society, would disqualify him from elected office.

It does need to be said that, although the allegations against Chaaban run long, the list of actual recent convictions that I could discover are limited to the bizarre assault case for throwing a coffee cup at colleagues after calling them “dogs” and “bastards”.

Some of the stuff from his murky past is actually quite funny, like allegedly getting two Senegalese witchdoctors to cast spells on his nemesis, Helen Zille.

Indeed, he would be a joke if it weren’t for the fact that he came alarmingly close to being mayor of Cape Town, and he was actually mayor for three years of the Cape Winelands district municipality, which meant he was nominally in charge of Stellenbosch, Worcester, Paarl and Wellington.

In the case of Chaaban you cannot blame the electorate for poor judgement. He has never had public support. In Witzenberg, his National People’s Party (NPP) has one council seat after receiving 1 400 votes. He ran the Winelands with the NPP holding a single seat out of 24; and when he nearly ousted Zille as mayor in 2007, his Africa Muslim Party had a mere two seats out of 210.

Chaaban simply played the balance-ofpower card brilliantly and, in a province littered with either hung councils (ones that require a coalition to govern) or perilously thin majorities, he found fertile territory, usually with the ANC.

The chief offender along this road was Ebrahim Rasool who, in his desperation to get at Zille, was prepared to promote Chaaban and, as part of the process, launched the legally flawed Erasmus Commission.

How he justifies that to himself I do not know.

Whatever your views on Zille or the DA, there’s no rational space where you can argue that the interests of the people of this city would have been better served by having Chaaban as mayor.

To be fair, the DA also has kept some very dubious company in its time and the very nature of coalitions is compromise.

But, surely, there’s a line where you say, irrespective of realpolitik, that you will not do business with somebody.

Surely, that line is Badih Chaaban.