As convicted fraudster and perjurer Bathabile Dlamini clings on as the president of the ANC Women’s League, the nation waits to see if Cyril Ramaphosa will instruct her to step aside, roll gently aside, fall down and twitch slightly to one side, or simply keep doing what she’s been doing, namely, glaring blearily and belligerently at a future she neither understands nor is in any way equipped to meet.
Dlamini, we are told, will learn her fate on Monday, presumably to give the ANC the weekend to decide just how smallanyana her famous skeletons are and how much blowback her axing might cause.
In public, however, the party is doing its best impression of a law-abiding citizen, which is to say a very terrible impression: on Wednesday, Ramaphosa told journalists that the ANC is a “process-based organisation”, as if that automatically meant something good and didn’t perfectly describe the Sicilian mafia, human trafficking rings, the apartheid government, and gut bacteria.
Still, we all know what he meant. The trouble is, thanks to the last three weeks, we also know it’s codswallop.
If you or I had been convicted of perjury 22 days ago, we would have been unemployed for the past 21 days. If we’d also been convicted of fraud back in 2006, it wouldn’t even have come to that: we’d have been called in to HR for a little chat the moment the new charges came to light, and told to get cracking on our resignation letters.
But you and I don’t live in the warm, gently rumbling, eternally constipated bowel that is the ANC, where being a literal criminal has never been much of a hindrance to long-term employment.
But you and I don’t live in the warm, gently rumbling, eternally constipated bowel that is the ANC, where being a literal criminal has never been much of a hindrance to long-term employment.
That’s because the ANC doesn’t see the laws of the republic as the ultimate arbiter. In the world in which you and I live, a guilty verdict changes everything, but in the ANC, it is simply one of many contributing factors to a decision, acting more like a recommendation than an imperative, one argument among many to weigh up when deciding whether to reshuffle someone somewhere slightly less public.
No wonder Dlamini was so outraged this week when treasurer-general Paul Mashatile suggested she should resign.
“The whole thing is not innocent, the way people are speaking it sounds premeditated,” Dlamini told Eyewitness News. “You cannot have a senior official of the ANC saying I must resign from the ANC.”
Her recently expanded criminal record was not at issue. She wasn’t denying anything. No, the problem here was that Mashatile had broken a golden rule, namely, that senior ANC members don’t tell convicted criminals to resign. If it was happening, it wasn’t because the party had finally decided to obey the law. It had to be a conspiracy.
She’s not entirely wrong. Commenting on “their rush” to ditch her, Dlamini insisted that “this is about December, it’s just about December”, when the ANC meets to decide whether it wants to die slowly or quickly. As a favourite of the RET camp, Dlamini’s career is unlikely to survive into 2023.
But the fact that she’s survived deep into 2022, and remained in high office three weeks after being convicted a second time, well, what more evidence do we need that the ANC truly is a “process-based organisation”?
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