One day, when historians look back at the burning brown paper bag of dog turds that was the second decade of ANC rule, I hope they ask, at least in a footnote, why it was that corrupt cadres managed so consistently to spend their stolen loot on such mediocre stuff.
When I was a child, I read with awe and wonder about the pleasure domes built by the great thieves of history. Gilded Roman palaces; bejewelled Byzantine temples; the endless baroque corridors and formal gardens of European royalty.
Even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, some of the most corrupt leaders in the world were still surrounding themselves in gold and satin, like Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu or Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, who spent way more than R1bn on a vast palace in the tiny village of Gbadolite, replete with its own airport, designed to be long enough for Concorde to use.
Which is why, when we first heard that Jacob Zuma had spent R240m on “security upgrades” at Nkandla and opposition MPs finally got access and did an inspection, I assumed we were about to see all the shiny kitsch and Mafia-bride bling you can get for a quarter of a billion bucks.
Instead, we saw what looked like a recently abandoned municipal holiday resort in one of SA’s least popular provinces: low, squat, sprawling, haunted by goats and chickens, the architectural incarnation of low expectations and parochial taste.
Just show us we’re not saddled with the least imaginative frauds in history. Because if you’re not going to govern or stop looting, at least stop being so goddamned dull.
Since then, it has become clear that Zuma was no fluke. SA’s predatory elite might have garish portraits painted of themselves (take a bow, Zandile Gumede) or take their families off for the odd shopping spree in Dubai, but generally speaking there are no Gbadolite palace complexes springing up in Saxonwold or streets in Paris being bought up by the local tenderpreneurs.
And this week it seemed SA corruption had managed to become even shabbier than it already is, as we read allegations that Digital Vibes, recent beneficiaries of R150m, had bought Zweli Mkhize’s son a car. An 18-year-old car, worth R160,000.
Is that really how far we’ve fallen? After 10,000 years of watching kings and presidents loot their people and shower themselves in ludicrous luxury, have we really reached a point in this country where the beneficiaries of vast corruption are so limited in their hedonistic vision that they can’t think further than a clapped-out clunker that was built before most current MK veterans were born?
No man, guys. If you’re going to keep robbing us, which you clearly are, you need to do better. You need to build something huge and shiny and obscene so we can see where our money is going. A new suburb consisting entirely of marble palaces. A rollercoaster for your cats made of platinum. A 35-storey granite statue of you shitting on your oath of office. It doesn’t matter.
Just show us we’re not saddled with the least imaginative frauds in history. Because if you’re not going to govern or stop looting, at least stop being so goddam dull.
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