ANC deploys fog of confusion

Yes, Perseverance took a historic selfie, but closer to home Gwede Mantashe’s parallel universe was impossible to ignore

History will remember Mantashe as a less articulate version of Rumsfeld

If you want to know what is wrong with the country, look no further than last week’s ludicrous attempt by ANC chair Gwede Mantashe to define “deployment” in terms of the party’s alternative reality.

It was classic obfuscation by Mantashe, who used a similar strategy when he was secretary-general during Jacob Zuma’s “nine wasted years”. By Mantashe’s logic, “you don’t vote against a sitting president” and “the ANC must be able to decide to recall its president”. So, if another party points out that Zuma handed over control of the country to the Guptas, you block him from being impeached because … your party didn’t start that process.

OK, so after repeatedly voting against motions of no confidence, why didn’t the ANC recall its own president (as it did with Thabo Mbeki in 2008)? Well, Mantashe didn’t say. Nor did he say why the party decided to ignore its own integrity commission, which said in 2013 that Zuma should be recalled.

I should be writing about dramatic technological developments, of which there are many, including the first powered flight on Mars. But, like many others, I spent last week watching Mantashe trying to persuade us that day is night and that “cadre deployment” differs from “the deployment of cadres”. In the ANC’s mythical world, it has a deployment policy, but not a cadre deployment policy. This, the party’s own Donald Rumsfeld assures us, “makes a huge difference”.

Coming from a man who has been named in dubious contexts at the Zondo commission, including for home security upgrades courtesy of Bosasa, it’s hard to stomach. And yet, he’s now a minister. If you recall Angelo Agrizzi’s testimony, the R300,000 bill for Mantashe’s home upgrades was paid by a corrupt firm. Yet the ANC chair claims he didn’t know who paid. He peddled the idea that his security consultant organised it with a “family friend” who happened to be a Bosasa executive.

In other testimony, he used the ANC’s other improbable defence: “What we know today, we didn’t know then.” The ANC scoffed at the media reports detailing the brazen theft orchestrated at the Saxonwold shebeen, he said, because it thought they were “racist”. Yet in 2013 minister Fikile Mbalula told an ANC national executive committee meeting that he’d been informed of his promotion by the Guptas. Only the infamous Waterkloof landing for Gupta wedding guests seemed to raise ANC eyebrows.

Mantashe could simply have quoted Rumsfeld, the sabre-rattling former US secretary of state: “There are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” The

ANC’s go-to category is known unknowns — things it pretends not to know, though, like state capture, they are obvious to everyone. Except we now have Eskom’s R500bn debt hanging over the economy. Thanks, Mr Mantashe. History will remember you as a less articulate, even more evasive version of Rumsfeld. x