ANC’s Gupta fury could just revive Madiba ideal

IN POLITICAL terms, Nelson Mandela had perfect pitch. From his potentially suicidal speech at the start of the Rivonia trial to his address to the nation after Chris Hani’s assassination, he could, in his prime, read the mood of his audience and play to it.

When, occasionally, he did strike a wrong note, as with his call to lower the voting age to 14, he could hear the discord and would move quickly to get back in tune.

Jacob Zuma, by comparison, has a tin ear. From his crass responses at his trial for rape – a charge on which he was acquitted – to his mishandling of the public expenditure on his private Nkandla compound, Zuma usually is attuned only to the sycophantic circle around him.

Knowing he could be sentenced to death on the charge of sabotage, Mandela said in 1963: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

When Zuma speaks, as he did to ANC campaign volunteers this week, it is others who should be willing to work for no personal reward. He and his friends visibly get to share the good things.

So why then was Zuma so quick to recognise the significance of the furore over the misuse by his friends, the Guptas, of the country’s most important military air base? It was quite out of character for him or his government to respond so quickly to scandal.

Even the official inquiry announced by Justice Minister Jeff Radebe was ordered to report within just seven days instead of the months and years allowed for the investigation of other critical issues ranging from allegations of corruption to the police massacre at Marikana.

Someone in Zuma’s office went as far as to leak to a few newspapers the alleged fact of his personal outrage at the incident now known as Guptagate.

“President Jacob Zuma is said to have been so infuriated by the embarrassment caused by the security breach at the Waterkloof Air Force Base that, on the same day, he ordered Defence Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula back from a meeting with her counterparts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” reported the Mail & Guardian.

Where was that outrage when the miners died, when our soldiers were led so fatally ill-prepared into the fire of the Central African Republic’s rebel forces or when he learned that the ministers appointed to his first cabinet had rushed to buy cars costing the equivalent of a state old age grant for up to 92 years?

Some penny – or gold sovereign – must have dropped within his earshot to cause Zuma to allow a completely unprecedented public relations exercise to swing into action.

We learned the convenient secret of his personal outrage and a clutch of ministers took endless questions from reporters without pleading a more important engagement.

We were invited to believe the damage control was coming from the president, but Mac Maharaj, the spokesman who usually gets to clean up his mess, declined to confirm the “outrage” rumour.

Instead, he issued a statement welcoming the Guptagate inquiry with this caveat: “The president has emphasised that the investigation and the manner in which this matter is handled should not be allowed to impact negatively on the warm and friendly historical relations that exist between the governments of the Republic of South Africa and the Republic of India and also between the peoples of South Africa and India....”

That sounded more like a man protecting one specially warm and friendly relationship than the fury of an enraged head of state.

The outrage, it seems, is less Zuma’s and more among other leaders of the tripartite alliance. The focus on the violation of our National Key Points Act is just a proxy for growing concern about Zuma’s special relationship with the brothers Gupta.

I hope someone will file a parliamentary question to find out whether, and if so how often, other private planes have been allowed to use the VIP terminal at Waterkloof. It really is not that unusual for military and civilian planes to share airports around the world. What is unusual is when the privilege is in the personal gift of one person – such as a president.

The National Key Point designation has been so degraded by its application to protect Zuma in the Nkandla scandal that it seems silly to raise it in the context of the Gupta invasion.

The real concern of the alliance leaders is the one voiced by Robben Island stalwart Ahmed Kathrada’s foundation this week: “The investigation should reveal how a single family has come to wield such immense administrative and political influence in such a short space of time, which it so brazenly displays over and over again. South Africans will recall that, not so long ago, this same family used the Zoo Lake as a private landing strip for its helicopters.”

In another small signal of the status the family assumes for itself, Helen Zille, the Western Cape premier, revealed in January that a Gupta secretary had called her office to demand an official escort from the airport to the city for one of the brothers. She said no, but others, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zuma, probably have said yes to many similar requests.

We can but hope that Zuma’s evident preference for patronage and privilege rather than the violation of an apartheid-era security law is the real reason behind the ANC’s rare fury.

Then perhaps the right head might roll and we can get back to the ideal of equal opportunity for which Mandela was willing to die.

Brendan Boyle is editor of the Daily Dispatch