Tokyo Sexwale says there are two types of journalists: those who do their work and those who trade gossip in the gutter. It turns out there are also two kinds of conspiracy theorists: those who understand they’ve been had and walk away, and those who double down on live television over the course of two excruciating hours.
Casting Sexwale to host the South African incarnation of The Apprentice was clearly prophetic. His performance on Thursday, and it was a performance, was Trumpian to its core, rambling from self-aggrandising asides to affable bon mots to unsubstantiated claims of sinister conspiracies to deeply felt grievances. When he spoke about being ignored by the finance minister and the presidency (he seems to have been literally blue-ticked on WhatsApp) it was clear those two hours were as much about being seen as they were about his so-called revelations.
Like Trump, he said everything and nothing, revealing enemies made of spiderwebs and bombast, casting shadows on a wall and calling them proof.
Inevitably, there was nothing new of any substance. Thursday was simply a deeper dive into an empty pool, and it was painful to watch him hit the floor. Here was someone who had branded himself an incisive captain of industry, floundering in the filthy bilges where fantasists curate their little heaps of grievance and reconstruct the world in a way that soothes them.
Sexwale had some of the old charisma, even if it was tinged with the desperation of a man trying to offload a plunging asset, but what he really needed was a corroborating witness.
How lucky, then, that journalists should find one in the very room in which he was delivering his one-man show. With startling, perhaps even suspicious, speed, they discovered and began to interview a certain Fanie Fondse, reportedly a shareholder in the SA Reserve Bank (SARB) and a man whose surname is apparently real and not, as many assumed, a scam within a scam.
Yes, said Mr Fondse, he could confirm that the Spiritual White Boy fund existed, alongside another called Wonder Boy.
RET Twitter exploded. Here, at last, was proof of a monstrous crime: the deliberate impoverishment of a people. It was all there, in the fantasy presented as fact. Sexwale had claimed there was more than enough money to provide free education and generous social grants. Fanie Fondse had confirmed it. And Ramaphosa and Tito Mboweni had taken that dream of salvation and eaten it.
None of the furious tweeters I saw bothered to ask why the last revolutionary, Jacob Zuma, had twice failed to respond to the fund’s offer to shower the country with free money.
Likewise, nobody seemed particularly alarmed by Fondse’s claim that the amount being sat on, or stolen, or both, featured “more than 15 zeroes”. Even if that’s in rand, it’s still more money than exists in the entire world.
Certainly none of them had Googled Fondse and discovered his 219-page affidavit, presented last year to a very patient and very tired committee at the SARB, alleging the theft of trillions of dollars worth of gold, partly by the World Bank’s “Committee of 300", aka “The Olympians”, who allegedly have their dirty roots in the British aristocracy and who are therefore basically the Illuminati, except they know how to hold the fish knife and don’t have chins.
I don’t need to tell you that Fanie’s treatise includes, among other zingers, an addendum that features the sorts of things your hermit uncle e-mails you to prove he’s a sovereign nation and therefore not bound by existing laws. (At one point on Thursday Fondse referred to “the illegal creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1930 in the USA”, sending up a great whoop of joy among those of us playing Conspiracy Theory Bingo.)
In the end, however, Sexwale did say two things that were absolutely true.
The first came right at the start of his show, when he grinned and said: “You’ll like what I’m going to say.” And boy, did they ever.
The second was his definition about the two kinds of journalism and, again, he was right.
On Thursday, some journalists looked sadly at Sexwale and then turned away, because they were taught as children that it’s rude to point and stare.
Others, however, were shockingly bad.
A Newzroom Afrika correspondent blithely dumped the word “allegedly” from her vocabulary, asking Fondse about “the current funds that have been misappropriated”.
eNCA, likewise, posted on Twitter that Sexwale had “revealed ... that billions ... were looted”. No, eNCA. All he revealed is that conspiracy theory can send South African journalists into the same paroxysms of credulity they found so distasteful when it was Fox News doing it with Trump’s fictions.
And that’s to say nothing of the major networks deciding to turn their cameras on and to stand back, a move that was not only unprofessional, but arguably inhumane.
Most dismal of all, however, was that it worked.
Whether Sexwale stumbled down this rabbit hole all by himself or was gently nudged there by more sophisticated people, the fact is that on Thursday he managed to smear President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration, undermine the legitimacy of the SARB and discredit honest journalists, a trifecta straight out of the wildest, wettest dreams of the RET Twitter army.
In the end, perhaps all one can do is quote the man Sexwale seemed to be channelling.
Fake news. Sad.
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