EDITORIAL | Zweli poor show: Mkhize’s SIU rebuke proves it’s good SA is rid of him

It seems Zweli Mkhize has moved through denial and anger to reach the “bargaining” phase of dealing with the loss of his job as health minister, public humiliation and the end of his political career.

That is the overwhelming impression to be gained from the affidavit he has filed at the Pretoria high court at the beginning of his campaign to discredit the Special Investigating Unit’s (SIU) conclusions about his role in the Digital Vibes scandal.

Mkhize has asked the court to declare the conduct of the SIU in making adverse findings against him unlawful and unconstitutional, as well as to review and set aside the unit’s report and referral letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa.

But in its incessant use of the victim card and its avoidance of key issues, the affidavit does Mkhize little credit, and in its determination to point fingers everywhere except at himself, it is disappointingly redolent of nearly every other ANC politician accused of wrongdoing.

“There were clear breaches of basic fairness” in the investigation, Mkhize said, complaining that when he was “prosecutorially” interviewed by the SIU, he had not been given advance notice of all the questions that would be asked.

The assumption Mkhize appears to make is that because he is in some way special he should not be treated like a common criminal, many of whom are arrested and thrown in a cell without so much as a by your leave, let alone an interview, and told only that they have the right to remain silent.

Perhaps that’s a right Mkhize would have been well advised to exercise, because his next move was to try to distance himself from the two women behind Digital Vibes, Tahera Mather and Naadhira Mitha.

The SIU report to Ramaphosa described them as Mkhize’s “close associates”, which seems reasonable, since for years Mather was his communications adviser and Mitha his PA. But according to Mkhize’s affidavit they are no more than “members of the public” who at some stage asked to be photographed with him.

“Group photos in which I was present with both Ms Mather and Ms Mitha were after-event photos, commonly taken. This is not uncommon in a life of a public representative,” he said.

To stretch credulity even further and disappoint millions of parents who instinctively stick by their children through thick and thin, Mkhize then hung his son out to dry.

Dedani Mkhize, who received R300,000 and a second-hand Toyota Land Cruiser courtesy of the R150m Digital Vibes was paid by the health department, is “estranged” from his parents, said Mkhize, and they had no idea he had benefited from the casual largesse of Mather.

Even if this is true, it is an unconscionable statement in a document that Mkhize must have known would quickly enter the public domain. What type of person, desperate to save his own skin, is prepared to throw his own child to the wolves in the endeavour?

The answer is obvious: the type of person we do not need in public life and who many honest people who care about their families and their country would prefer never to hear from again.

And the less said the better about Mkhize's claim that R150m is a drop in the ocean compared with the health department’s R60bn budget. That is exactly the type of thinking that has landed SA in the corruption swamp.