When you’re standing in the middle of a burning circus tent, it can be hard to care about specific clowns, especially ones who have waddled out of the tent and into a distant sideshow. Which is why you’d be forgiven for not wondering why, exactly, deputy president David Mabuza has semigrated to Russia.
In case you’ve forgotten the story so far, what with trying to keep up with low-key coups and all, the official version is as follows.
In 2015, we are told, David Mabuza took ill at his birthday party, the victim either of very inept poisoners or fantastically bad caterers.
Unfortunately for Mabuza, doctors in SA don’t know what poison is or how to treat it, and so he had to fly to the only country in the world that knows how the human body works: Russia.
How he got there remains a bit vague. Last year, Duduzane Zuma claimed it was he, SA’s answer to Eric Trump, who whisked the ailing Mabuza off to Moscow, but this has neither been confirmed nor denied by the deputy president.
Since then, Mabuza’s party has insisted he is totally, definitely, 100% a functioning deputy president who just has to nip back to Russia every so often because there are no computers there, so his Russian doctors can’t e-mail instructions to anyone in SA.
Which brings us to the absurd present, in which our alleged veep is once again in Russia, once again for one of his very special “routine medical check-ups”, which take between two and four weeks; once again asking us to pretend that this isn’t all ridiculously suspicious.
Mabuza and his people in government want us to become habituated to these trips. They want us to stop wondering why he keeps going or, preferably, to believe the laughably dodgy explanations provided by his staff. But the more often he goes, the more urgent the questions become.
It is common knowledge that President Cyril Ramaphosa only ousted Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma at Nasrec in 2017 because Mabuza switched sides at the eleventh hour, effectively selling out his pals in the Zupta cabal in return for the deputy presidency.
What we don’t know, however, are the details of that deal, other than that it seemed to include annual trips to Russia, probably paid for by you and me, and some guarantee that the state would try to explain them away in the least ham-fisted way possible.
Now, I believe it is possible that someone tried to poison Mabuza in 2015. If that attempt involved a Russian nerve agent like Novichok, I also believe it’s possible Mabuza went to Moscow soon after to consult with the people who made it to figure out the best course of treatment.
What I don’t believe, however, is that Mabuza needs to keep going back to Russia.
In 2018, Sergei and Yulia Skripal were directly attacked with a military-grade nerve agent in Salisbury, UK. Seven weeks later, they were discharged from hospital, alive. The rest of the world knows how to treat poisons, even monstrous ones.
Mabuza and his people in government want us to become habituated to these trips. They want us to stop wondering why he keeps going or, preferably, to believe the laughably dodgy explanations provided by his staff.
But the more often he goes, the more urgent the questions become.
Mabuza is clearly not going for his health, so why is he going and on whose behalf? Is he negotiating something and, if he is, with whom and for whom? Is he working for Ramaphosa, his old pals the RET insurrectionists or himself?
Because it’s pretty clear he’s not working for us any more.
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