Not enough detergent to clean up leaders’ legacy
There comes a time in the life of every leader when the circus tent is subsiding gently down its pole and there’s an ominous silence coming from the animal cages round the back, that one begins to gaze out past the angrily drunk clowns vomiting behind the hay-bales and think about one’s legacy.
For some, this means it’s time to write a book, or at least dictate it to a someone who has once read one. Consider, for example, last year’s Jacob Zuma Speaks, the most-read nonfiction title sold out of a car boot in the parking lot of Mcdonald’s in South African publishing history. Say what you will about its quality, but history will record that it sold out, which is a funny coincidence, because that’s how history will remember Zuma too.
At the weekend, as the final volume of the Zondo report resounded across the country, Zuma and his team were whipped into a fresh frenzy of legacylaundering, spraying industrial amounts of bleach at the reeking stain that was his presidency and denouncing the Zondo commission, which he established, as “rotten”, “unlawful” and “wrong from the start”.
Most of it was nonsense, but I must admit some sounded quite reasonable. According to Mzwanele Manyi, for example, it was “absolute hogwash” that Zuma did everything he was told by the Guptas.
I tend to agree: for starters, I’m pretty sure the Guptas told Zuma not to get caught. Manyi also said Zuma did “not have any regrets” and remained “passionate about wrongness”. Again, I see no lie.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is also working hard on his legacy, jetting off to the G7 junket but not before getting the New Dawn typing pool to bang out a wide-ranging mea culpa — or at least a they-a culpa — for the Sunday Times.
The result was impressive: the piece had the passion, introspection and humility of a genuine confession; the sort that Renaissance popes made, recounting all their sins and looking very sorry indeed for dozens of seconds before they were forgiven and trotted off to go and do it all over again.
But other cardinals are less eager for such public performances of penitence, and on Friday Gwede Mantashe was pushing back as hard as the current conclave allows, cantankerously insisting that Zondo’s condemnation of cadre deployment as unlawful was badly misguided. “What is unlawful should be that in 1994 every head of the department was white,” Mantashe told News24. “That is really what is unlawful, but cadre deployment, which changed this situation, is now deemed unlawful.”
It was an extraordinary admission from someone who has historically been very good at playing both sides. After all, Mantashe is the man who in 2013 insisted that the Gupta family was not on the ANC’S radar, went out of his way to protect the increasingly compromised Zuma before finally agreeing that the Guptas had definitely been a corrupting influence back when he’d said they weren’t.
Just last year he was effortlessly straddling the fence once again, the arch-communist passionately defending a privately owned multinational, insisting that protests against Shell’s plans to drill off the Wild Coast were “apartheid and colonialism of a special type”. Yet on Friday it seemed that he had picked a side and pinned his colours firmly to the mast of unequivocal idiocy.
By implying that cadre deployment was the logical and legitimate solution to ending apartheid’s grip on the public service Mantashe was presenting the history — and the future — of SA’S bureaucracy as an extremely revealing binary in which we had only two options: racists enjoying sheltered employment, or deployed cadres. National Party stooges, or ANC stooges. White idiots or black idiots.
Completely absent from this worldview is the obvious, and desperately necessary, middle: a professional, excellent bureaucracy, created at first through a well-run programme of affirmative action and mentorship and then maintained by a good education system.
Of course, the latter is well beyond the ANC. But even affirmative action seems beyond Mantashe, as he asked: “How is [cadre deployment] different from affirmative action?” In this instance he was asking why affirmative action is acceptable to justice Zondo while cadre deployment is not. But I think it’s worth answering his question, if only for the record.
Simply put, affirmative action is a process whereby the best candidates are shortlisted for a post. If they possess identical skills, the job goes to the person or people the policy of affirmative action is intended to uplift, for example, black people or women.
Cadre deployment, on the other hand, is a process whereby you gaze dully at the best candidates, ask how they got into the building, call security to escort them off the premises, and then Whatsapp the MEC to ask if her nephew has been acquitted of that thing yet, and if he has, would he like to start as municipal manager on Tuesday? Because, you know, Monday is his me-time.
Mantashe knows this of course. It’s even possible he was up to his old fence-sitting routine again: by defending cadre deployment and criticising Zondo he is simultaneously ingratiating himself with philosopher-king Thabo Mbeki and the Zupta faction. It’s not a bad play, in theory.
In practise though, Mantashe’s legacy, just like those of Zuma and Ramaphosa, is already carved in stone. And there’s not enough bleach in the world.