TOM EATON | DonkeyGate has been opened and the opportunists have bolted

I don’t want to underplay ANC corruption, but on the scale of South African scandals, with state capture near the top, and construction mafias, Eskom saboteurs and politically deployed idiots somewhere in the middle, I’m afraid DonkeyGate is less a storm in a teacup than a sneeze near an espresso cup.

Of course, I understand why John Steenhuisen and the opposition have been tweeting that slogan as hard as they can since the news broke that the North West government paid R780,000 for 20 unusable donkey carts: everyone knows putting “Gate” on the end of a word automatically makes it sound rotten to the core, thanks to the infamous WatergateGate scandalgate that ended Richard Nixon’s presidencygate.

To be fair, it’s a gutsy play by Steenhuisen. Should any of the DonkeyGate donkeys go missing in the next few weeks, and it turns out their paddock gates were removed by fifth columnists, DonkeyGate will quickly unravel into DonkeyGateGateGate, which will look even more stupid than #DonkeyGate in official tweets, and that’s saying something.

The trouble is, it all feels a little ... forced.

First, the amount of money involved is absolutely minuscule compared to the stuff that happens all day, every day.

According to auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke’s latest report, the department of defence, the National Treasury and the department of extremely basic education waste a combined average of about R180m a year.

That’s a DonkeyGate every 38 hours. So why has this one made such a splash in the news cycle? Is it the donkeys? Do they trigger long-repressed childhood grief about Eeyore and his burst birthday balloons? Is it the uncomfortable association between Eeyore and the ANC, as we realise with a jolt that Luthuli House is the House At Poo Corner?

Once we start going down these sordid avenues, however, we have to admit the second slightly uncomfortable truth about DonkeyGate, namely, that those carts are platinum-grade service delivery by the standards of the ANC.

According to some of the recipients, the carts are badly designed, extremely uncomfortable to travel in, and started shaking themselves to pieces during their first trip along bumpy tracks.

I understand the disappointment, but let’s look at the positive implications.

What we have here is something that was not only designed, built and delivered, but which worked once before falling apart; a sequence of wins far beyond anything the ANC has managed in the last decade.

First, for something to be badly designed, it needs to have been designed, which means someone drew something on a napkin, which means we’ve already punched through the sound barrier and are talking about a level of performance and dedication unknown to all but the top percent of ANC delivery specialists.

But there’s more.

Where lesser cadres would have called it a day, putting their Aperol Spritz on the taxpayers’ account before faxing the napkin to the North West legislature, along with an invoice for R500,000, these Da Vincis pressed on.

As the hours passed, worried colleagues began to drift back to the bar, fretting that the visionaries had been overtaken by a kind of soul-sucking mania not seen since Bheki Cele found himself trapped in a lift with Fikile Mbalula and, to make small talk, asked him what he thought about the music of Beyoncé.

For a while it seemed that the team might even work all the way up until lunch, but then, at last, they fell back into their wicker chairs, exhausted and exultant, and looked at what they had created: a vehicle that could be attached to a donkey — and with a harness, mind you, not just staples like in their first draft — could carry humans far enough and in enough discomfort and fear for it to be described as uncomfortable, and even have parts attached to it that could subsequently fall off.

In short, what we have here is something that was not only designed, built and delivered, but which worked once before falling apart; a sequence of wins far beyond anything the ANC has managed in the last decade.

Finally, casting yet more doubt on DonkeyGate as a scandal, is the fact that it’s not even original.

Two years ago, a UK tabloid published a dramatic exposé of Labour leader Keir Starmer, revealing that the self-proclaimed leftist owned seven acres of meadow in the countryside and was therefore one of the landowning elite Labour was trying to destroy.

It soon turned out that while Starmer did in fact own the land, he had bought it to use as a donkey sanctuary and chosen that particular tract because his mother lived next door and liked to watch the donkeys.

Almost immediately, #DonkeyGate began to trend, a sardonic comment on the pettiness of the story and the agendas at play.

Indeed, until last week, it was a synonym for a non-story created to distract from larger failures or yank the narrative in another direction.

And perhaps it still is.

I’m not suggesting we dismiss or diminish the waste of public funds, or the disappointment of poor people being used as photo-ops by D-grade politicians. But I do think it’s worth wondering why we’re being fed this particular story in such large doses.

Who in the North West ANC would benefit from having this grotty little story trend nationally? Which factions are enjoying this, and which are seething? And how do they connect to the factional battles playing out at national level?

Perhaps this is simply one of those small stories that resonate naturally. But I just can’t shake the feeling that DonkeyGate is making an ass out of us.