WeeklySA_AdminCOMPACT: The agency had to cover Msholozi ‘s nakedness urgently at all cost with every leaf, including broken ones
By Paul Njabulo Vilakazi
South Africa enters the twilight of the shrewdest political schadenfreude visited upon its people, since the African National Congress matriculated to its most esoterically attained notch of power.
Or, even paradoxically, on the one hand, a shaky-ground of an industrial scale since and just before Polokwane; while all the while we have been quite not so awake to fathom the depth to which the whole riddle that was unfolding in tits and bits goes.
Meanwhile those with sharper discernment scalpels in hand, to go deeper into its then most ruthlessly threatening cancerous tumour at Polokwane – had not just worked harder to just remove Thabo Mbeki for puerile matters of personal power hunger – but more essentially to ensure the survival of their movement.
A factor whose exigency was not apparent to the uppity incumbent Thabo Mbeki, for his eternal self- delusion about his ‘super-man” powers to continue holding this organisation together, which had otherwise entered an early terminal stage for as long as Jacob Zuma lived. Thus, the land-slide vote to catapult Msholozi to ANC’s Number One was a rescue feat of a kind, in an almost earlier thought of ‘Mission Impossible’.
Otherwise, how do we explain this beyond a meteoric rise of a fellow with so chequered a history (despite, of course, his wonder-kid gifts) of having risen to be a head of their chief of intelligence in exile – and here is the nub:
Having survived a most gruelling rape charge trial and had no meaningful classroom education, among his foibles; how has he been able to rise to these dizziest heights?
All the while, it must have been a most colossal boulder on their stoep, to be just whimsically removed; a petrel on their neck, forever portending their doom; and Mbeki’s apparatchicks, forever amusing themselves then, with the rather peripheral gimmicks of quasi-power, and that Msholozi is just a country bumpkin. While those who had not only their ears on the ground, but also vital institutional memory, especially those of the most murky kind, were Zuma’s main backroom men. Unity has been a prelude to a Thuma Mina anthem, which incidentally Msholozi has already mocked by declaring: ‘Ngazi Thuma mina…’ The game plays on still.
One of the great schemes of things has been Zuma being played out and inadvertently punted by some of our best political commentators as a wannabe victim and this incidentally worked very well for his backroom in the movement.
So, the grandplan, as I continue to take licence to surmise was to have the Msholozi project run its full 10- year course, with the covert consent of the bigger Dons within and without the movement. To them, not once was he some looting Elephant in the room… Hence the most soporific-induced sleep-ever held magical sway in the pre-NASREC national elective conference.
The JZ gripe about the way Thabo had handled him, and then jettisoning him as he had deputised him as President, indeed expedited the rush to restore him to power, as he had then begun to hint at one day, spilling the most of rotten of beans; the smell of which would rise to the highest of global heavens.
The agency had to be: ‘Hey cover Msholozi’s nakedness urgently at all cost, with every leaf including the broken ones. Give him the lee-way also to repay himself reparations carelessly owed to him since the days he and Harry Gwala had been sent home to retire and used as tools that had reached their sell by date, when the internecine wars of KwaZulu-Natal had begun to somewhat abate and the glory of their yet-to-be washed spears overlooked, including the ‘impossible peace-making’ kudos in it all.
Instead of being celebrated, they had insult rubbed into their injury and being effectively OTHERED, as just a rustic lot who deserved not mansions , doled out to the Mandelas, the Sisulus, the Govan Mbekis and the power chaperoned for Thabo Mbeki’s taking, and blue-chip business directorships, ditched out to other ‘blue-blood princes’ such as Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa, by the Oppenheimers and the Ruperts of the moneyed world.
Now much later, suddenly some of ANC honchos, who had feigned the most a ‘most deep sleep during a revolution’ when it all had happened, were rudely awakened: ‘Hey chief, the movement is going to the dogs and something’s got to give…’
That he can dismantle the movement of our fathers in just one day, it would dialectically equal what he is allowed to rake in for himself and his tighter cronies even if the Gupta factor is quietly countenanced. Effectively abetting it to a point of later ducking under cover as they skip the country and abracabadra… they just can’t be found anywhere, even in the world of the great INTERPOL …
Now as the master teacher from Nazareth taught us, that ‘the poor will always be with us…’
Jacob Zuma will always be with the ANC, till the end of time, often brought out to campaign for it as we head to the local elections…
JZ must really be, by the above accounts, some deity of the ANC.
-Paul Njabulo Vilakazi is a humourist and cartoonist. He writes in his personal capacity.
