Trouble at the Union Buildings is as old as SA

Dear

Wreaders, hile I write this week’s letter, the piet-my-vrous, robins, weavers and pesky hadedas in our garden are all loudly interjecting in their early morning Conference of the Birds.

Out of the window of our little unit in a Pretoria residential complex, I see a beautiful view of the koppie in the Faerie Glen Nature Reserve. It stands as majestically as it has for two billion years.

The sky is mottled with cloud and it has not fallen on my head. But, yes, down the road in Arcadia, on top of the equally rugged Meintjieskop, where the Union Buildings stand, trouble is brewing. Again.

It brewed when the buildings housed the poisoned heart of an unholy alliance between the British overlords and one small segment of our people, the Afrikaners.

It has also brewed there since we became a proper democracy. After a brief moment of elation, it’s been a rollercoaster ride of a few highs and increasingly more lows.

Since Nelson Mandela gently segued out of the seat of power in 1999, every one of his successors has fallen on the swords of their own hubris and the liberation party’s descent into a venal Machiavellian mess.

To understand the trouble the current occupant of the Union Buildings finds himself in, let me take you back to the year 2012.

While Jacob Zuma and his allies were enjoying their turn to eat, Cyril Ramaphosa did what he loved most. He forked out R15-million bidding for game for his Phala Phala game farm in Bela-Bela.

This news leaped out of the usual Farmer’s Weekly fare into the mainstream media because Ramaphosa also bid R19.5-million for a single buffalo cow, though he was outbid. He apologised: “It is a mistake in the sea of poverty. I live in a community... The damage has been done, I will live with it.”

He may have lived with the damage caused by his rich man’s burden, but he has not really learned from it.

Ramaphosa is a strutter in the stratosphere of the super-rich and powerful. His hubris led him to believe that his vague explanation of how $580,000 (R8.7-million) came to be stashed at Phala Phala would be sufficient for the independent panel led by Judge Sandile Ngcobo. This is why he faces an impeachment hearing.

Read our lead story by Marianne Merten to get to the bottom of it all.

Are we going to be okay? Dear readers, that’s up to us. We can vote for people of integrity to occupy the Union Buildings – and also do what each of us can do every day to fix what’s broken.

Write to me at heather@dailymaverick. co.za about your views.

Yours in defence of truth, Heather