WeeklySA_AdminPOLITICAL WUNDERKIND: Freedom fighter leaves poverty in a cloud of dust in the wake of his elegant R3,5m Porsche 911 Carrera GTS…
FUN GALORE
with Sy Makaringe
WHEN Smuts Ngonyama, the ANC’s head of the presidency during former president Thabo Mbeki’s tenure, infamously said he did not join the struggle to be poor, he immediately divided the party of liberation right down the middle.
This was at the time when it had come to light that Ngonyama stood to personally pocket an estimated R160 million through his participation in a black economic empowerment Telkom deal, and swell the ranks of instant post-apartheid black millionaires that already boasted several struggle heroes such as Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale, Mathews Phosa and many others. On one side of the divide were the Thomas Sankara-type, who regarded participation in the struggle against an evil system such as apartheid as a calling or a noble cause to achieve equality, fairness and justice for all, irrespective of their station in life.
This group abhorred crass materialism and political careerism and their manifestations of wealth accumulation and conspicuous consumption, in a country that was mired, as it still is, in extreme levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment.
On the other side of the debate stood a crowd that saw political activism as a route to riches that went with opulent lifestyles, luxury seaside mansions, exotic holiday homes in foreign lands, expensive whisky and champagne, fancy fast cars and high-end private schools abroad for the their children. It was not known until now, at least publicly, to which of the two groups former ANC spokesperson Pule Mabe belonged or subscribed.
Every time the former fiery ANC Youth League member, ex-ANC MP, trained journalist and member of the party’s national executive committee took a public platform, he seemed to be always passionately speaking for the poor and being on the side of the downtrodden.
That appeared to be so until last week at least when, in a jaw-breaking move, the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) obtained a preservation order barring Mabe from selling his Porsche 911 Carrera GTS, which will set anyone back by R3,5 million, and a luxury mansion at the exclusive and affluent Steyn City, a golf estate where residential properties are priced at as high as R35 million, assets that very few people knew Mabe to possess.
The order came in the wake of an investigation into an allegedly problematic R27 million Ekurhuleni tuk-tuks tender in which Mabe has been implicated.
Mabe’s struggles not to be poor have indeed bore him remarkable fruits, especially given the fact that his last known job as a spokesperson for the ANC did not pay that much as the cash-strapped political party then was even battling to pay its workers.
HOOK OR CROOK
ANOTHER struggle hero who did not join the struggle to be poor is former president Jacob Zuma, now the so-called Commander General of the radical Umkhonto we Sizwe Party.
On his return from political exile in the early 1990s, Zuma found himself holed up in the backwaters of Nkandla, in rural KwaZulu-Natal, while his comrades in Johannesburg, the country’s economic hub, were living it up with the champions of white monopoly capital. Alone and forgotten in his rural home, the struggle icon had to depend on freebies he received from old friend, Schabir Shaik, to support his large family and its satellites.
Come to think of it, Shaik even paid for Msholozi’s car wash. That’s how deep Zuma’s financial woes were at the time.
Even the R1 million that former president Nelson Mandela gifted him out of pity did not go very far. Reminding himself that he, too, did not join the struggle to be poor, Zuma decided to use any available means to pull himself out of poverty by his own bootstraps, and by hook or by crook.
Former ANC treasurer-general Mathews Phosa, in his political memoir, Witness to Power, recalls the Guptas telling him that they had given Msholozi R20 million to pass on to the ANC as its share of a joint Dubai investment. But the money never made its way into the ANC’s books, according to Phosa. And Zuma has never spoken about it till today.
No prizes for guessing in whose pockets the money eventually ended up in.
LONG LIVE WMC
IF ever there were a group of people that the so-called Commander-in-Chief of the Economic Freedom Fighters, Sello Julius Malema, detested with all his heart, it would be none other than white monopoly capitalists.
He hates white monopoly capital with a passion, ostensibly because it is blocking the black majority from accessing the country’s wealth. But more accurately it is because it has excluded him and his crowd from the trough.
But WMC, as Malema and his ilk on the left of the political spectrum call it, came for an unexpected praise from the firebrand who is fast losing his shine during his underwhelming interview with his party’s spokesperson, Leigh-Ann Mathys, as part of the build-up to the EFF’s third elective conference next month.
In the podcast, Malema hailed both Vodacom and Standard Bank for remembering he existed by sending him well-wishing messages on his birthday every year without fail, something that his own party, the EFF, he admitted, had not done in all its 11 years of existence.
With his presidential ambitions fast diminishing after his party was elbowed into third place by uBaba’s uMkhonto we Sizwe Party, and, in the wake of the party haemorrhaging influential leaders, Malema is perhaps eyeing a seat or two on the boards of some of the country’s white monopoly companies. As they say, in politics (and possibly in business too), there are no permanent enemies; only permanent interests.
MSHOLOZI’S ‘DALI-NG’
JULIUS Malema gave this damp squib of an interview to his embedded interviewer, Leigh-Ann Mathys, just after Dali Mpofu, the party’s former chairperson, had announced his defection to uBaba Msholozi’s uMkhonto we Sizwe Party.
Mpofu’s announcement that he was dumping Malema to go to bed with Jacob Zuma, with whom he had been flirting for years while representing him in his many legal challenges, did not come as a surprise. Mpofu was in this very bed before – when Zuma was ANC president. What was interesting, though, was when Mpofu described himself in his exclusive interview with SABC political editor Mzwandile Mbeje as by nature a “utility player”.
It was such a strange term. So a number of possible synonyms were tested against this unique term for a match. One after another they were eliminated until only one remained.
The matching term was, wait for it, “political prostitute”.
EISH, THIS INGRISH #1
“IN all the communities we have been going to, community policing forums have been activated. So, in schools where learners are sleeping over, we have SGBs, we have volunteer parents who are sleeping with the learners.” – Phillipine Modika, Director: Mopani West District of the Department of Basic Education in Limpopo, speaking on Newzroom Afrika on matric pupils’ safety ahead of this year’s final matric exams.
EISH, THIS INGRISH #2
“IF a company has been found to have been contributed into the crisis we are at, whether how big the company is, there should be a penalty that is being penalised to that company.” – Nontobeko Luzipo, Deputy Secretary-General of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), commenting on Newzroom Afrika, on the ongoing illegal mining crisis in the country.
EISH, THIS INGRISH #3
“WE are left with 20 minutes to go.” – Advocate Charles Mnisi, a defence lawyer in the protracted Senzo Meyiwa murder trial during his cross-examination of Brigadier Bongani Gininda, the State’s star witness, in the Pretoria High Court on Thursday.
