Honour amongst ‘thieves': MK Party MP choices are a bold move
Is Jacob Zuma trolling us?
He has just appointed several men with massive dark clouds of suspicion hanging over their heads.
To do this, Zuma summarily dismissed 15 of his loyal MPs, to make way for the newcomers.
Amongst those sworn in last week as MPs were Brian Molefe, Siyabonga Gama, and Lucky Montana, all former CEOs of state-owned enterprises who faced scrutiny during Zuma's presidency for their involvement in state capture allegations.
Of course they have denied all the allegations, but some are still facing pending court cases.
In fact, Zuma’s MKP MPs will be spending a lot of time fighting charges related to corruption or mismanagement of some sort.
The whole thing reads like a symbiotic incestuous family tree.
Take Zuma’s new parliamentary chief whip Mzwanele Manyi, who used to head up government communications, before going on to “buy” The New Age newspaper and ANN7 news channel from the Guptas, using the millions of Rand that the Guptas loaned him.
The deal looked solid because Zuma’s government was buying millions of copies of the paper, which made sales figures look lucrative to a buyer.
For example, there was a period of time when SAA gave away free New Age newspapers to passengers on every flight, at a time when the airline was in deep financial trouble.
Government departments and SOEs were also supporting it with extensive advertising and sponsorship deals - remember the ANN7 Business Breakfasts resourced by the rival SABC and sponsored by Transnet, Eskom and Telkom. Meanwhile a lot of the advertising came from Prasa (under Montana), Transnet (under Gama) and Eskom (under Molefe).
Of course none of this seems to bother Zuma, who has the biggest cloud of all hanging over his head.
Incorporating the appointments into the Zuma-persecution narrative, his party’s statement reads: “The MKP fully embraces these capable and experienced public servants, because we know that the neo-colonial elite and establishments, as well as the Ramaphosa-led ANC, hounded them out of state-owned enterprises so that they (can) weaken them and later privatise them.”
Zuma himself has been quoted as saying that he is committed to assembling the most brilliant and capable members of society into the party fold.
What I want to know is, how the people who voted for the MKP feel about these appointments.
These men are tasked with representing them at the highest level of our political system, and yet there are questions around the values they embrace.
For the rest, I am still digesting the brazen gall of it all.
Most organisations, especially new ones, won’t even go anywhere near an individual that is even slightly suspicious.
But Zuma is either overly confident in the support of his voter base no matter what, or completely blind to his own shortcomings.
So there are two possible answers to whether he is trolling us or not.
Maybe their claims of innocence are true and Zuma knows something about it that we don’t.
Or they are guilty as sin and this is their shameless and very public reward for having done their master’s corrupt bidding.
And if the latter is even remotely true, then we have some deeply honest conversations with ourselves as a society hoping for a better future.
We also need to give some critical thinking skills and intelligent perspective to our fellow voters.
By the way, speaking of the MKP and court cases, the axed MPs are due to appear as complainants in the Western Cape High Court tomorrow, seeking to reverse their expulsions from Parliament
dailyvoice@inl.co.za