Now that Bathabile Dlamini has been convicted of perjury as well as fraud, South Africans are all asking the same thing: will she get a small promotion in the ANC or a big one?
Some idealists have suggested that lying under oath should be enough to force her to step aside, at least from her extremely lucrative job as chief shill of the outfit that, in another lifetime, used to be known and respected as the ANC Women’s League.
One understands their optimism. The ANC’s step-aside rule might have dribbled off Gwede Mantashe like water off an oil-slicked penguin, but he is largely untouchable, having embedded himself in the lower intestine of power, while managing to play both sides of the Ramaphosa-RET schism.
Dlamini, on the other hand, is the washed-up, hollowed-out wreck who almost sank the social grants system and whose only supporters these days seem to be halfhearted RET tweeters. Should she be pushed, she would disappear into the swamp without a ripple.
I suppose there are many people in SA who want to see her censured, but I must admit I’m not sure I could stomach the hypocrisy of it all.
Of course, criminal incompetence should be pilloried, but if I’m honest, a small part of me would rather watch her get away with it than have to listen to the ANC tell me that lying under oath is bad enough to get you fired, but shelling children’s hospitals in Ukraine isn’t bad enough to condemn.
Of course, criminal incompetence should be pilloried, but if I’m honest, a small part of me would rather watch her get away with it than have to listen to the ANC tell me that lying under oath is bad enough to get you fired, but shelling children’s hospitals in Ukraine isn’t bad enough to condemn.
Because that’s where we still are, by the way. On Thursday, President Cyril Ramaphosa wheeled out another apologist for aggression, this time minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele, who explained that “Russia would have their reasons” for invading Ukraine and, by extension, bombarding civilian areas.
He’s not wrong, of course. Russia does have its reasons, first telling us that its “special military operation” was essentially a peacekeeping mission to protect secessionists in the east, then announcing it wanted to de-Nazify the whole country, then insisting it was reacting to Nato expansion (by, er, trying to push its western border up against Nato members), and now claiming it is reacting to US bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
Next week it will no doubt reveal a Ukrainian plot to eat Russian babies, and the ANC will tut-tut and agree that eating babies is probably not the right thing to do, unless Russians want to do it, in which case the West needs to stop trying to impose its culinary tastes on the rest of the world and just accept that sometimes a baby needs to get eaten for its own good.
If this feels like a digression away from Dlamini, it isn’t. Enabling, protecting and even promoting people like her is exactly why the ANC is refusing to condemn a war of imperial aggression. They’re part of the same modus operandi, where loyalty to the party and the long-distant past have always come before doing the right thing.
Maybe Dlamini will be rusticated. Maybe she won’t. But either way, the very fact that we’re still talking about her, almost two decades after she should have disappeared forever, says it all.
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