CHRIS ROPER: The meaning of Nkandla, a decade later

Every couple of years or so, I get a rash of interview requests from news organisations, local and international, to talk about Mandy Rossouw’s 2009 Mail & Guardian story that broke the scandal of Nkandla to the world. You could do an interesting visualisation of these interviews over time, as they are pegged to what could be termed Jacob Zuma crisis points: moments in the sadly twinned histories of our diminishing democracy and its most destructive politician.

This week, one of those interviews was with Jeune Afrique, Africa’s most widely read weekly news magazine, founded in Tunisia in 1960. Let’s take a moment to give a shout out to that sort of longevity. I googled "Financial Mail launch date" so I could make fun of the upstarts who edit these pages, and wow — the FM was founded in 1959.

But back to the interviews. The main reason I accept them is that Rossouw, the journalist who broke the Nkandla story and did all the initial investigating, is sadly no longer with us to add her inimitable gloss.

This week, the French journalist interviewing me asked an interesting question. Why is the Nkandla story so important to South Africans, and why does it always loom so large in our collective imagination?

There are as many answers to what "Nkandla" means, of course, as there are to what "South Africans" means. In the remote possibility that you aren’t aware of the saga, I’m using "Nkandla" as shorthand for the exposure of Zuma’s use of R246m of state funds to make improvements to his family home.

As for defining South Africans, I’m afraid that Nkandla belongs to all of us, but is used in different ways. For some, it’s a legitimate example of the ill-gotten gains of state capture, and a righteous bludgeon with which to beat the anticorruption drum. For others, alas, it serves as a trope in a racist discourse.

One reason Nkandla resonates so loudly, I told the French journalist, is that it buys into that terrible stereotype of the dictator who uses public money to build his obscenely luxurious palace while his subjects starve.

You’ll find examples from all over the world, and throughout history. Saddam Hussein, for example, built a staggering 100-plus palaces and "VIP luxury residences" in Iraq, at what US intelligence estimated to be a total cost of $2bn. Of course, the US also thought the palaces were concealing weapons of mass destruction, so take that from whence it came.

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s ironically named "People’s Palace" in Bucharest had 1,000 rooms and occupied more land than any other building on earth bar, perhaps ironically, the US Pentagon.

There are other locations exemplifying the corruption that has bedevilled SA. But these three are perhaps the unholy trinity: the father’s Nkandla, the son’s Dubai, and the Guptas’ ghostly Saxonwold Shebeen

The most egregious African example is probably Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the erstwhile emperor of Central Africa. He built a multimillion-dollar palace, and his ludicrous coronation apparently cost about $20m — one-third of the annual budget of the short-lived Central African Empire, "and all of France’s aid money for that year".

These are the palaces we think of when we picture dictatorial excess, awash in millions of dollars in gold, diamonds and extraordinarily bad style. For some reason, gold toilets often feature, as do personal zoos.

So for some South Africans, I told the French journalist, this is the trope that Nkandla echoes.

He expressed disbelief, with words to this effect: "Nkandla isn’t a palace! I’ve seen pictures and video, it’s just ordinary."

It was a sobering revelation about how differently people from differing backgrounds see the world. Things bought at Nkandla, with citizens’ money, include a helipad, underground bunkers, a visitors’ centre, amphitheatre, chicken run, cattle kraal and, of course, the infamous swimming pool masquerading as a firepool.

To a French journalist, these are not equivalent to the excesses of cartoon dictators. They’re just ordinary things, and the implication is that we should judge Zuma differently to crazed dictators.

A helipad is not the same as the airstrip, built to accommodate a chartered Concorde, that Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko had built near his palace — itself a place "stuffed with Italian marble, antique French furniture, Venetian chandeliers, expensive tapestries, and monogrammed silver cutlery … cellars filled with thousands of bottles of pink champagne and vintage wine", and which needed "almost 1,000 expensively uniformed staff" to keep it running.

A chicken run is not even close to the (alleged) million square feet of marble and 3,500t of crystal that were part of Ceausescu’s palace.

And yet, in SA, one of the most unequal countries in the world, misusing millions of rands of state funds to improve your family home is pretty much as evil.

In a column I wrote a few years after Rossouw’s exposé, I made mention of "the atrocious conditions of some of the rural roads" when we originally drove to Nkandla, pointing out that "nowadays, of course, your average convoy of BMW sedans can sail blithely along smooth tar roads to the president’s residence".

Recently, those luxury cars have been sailing towards Zuma on a regular basis, for strategy meetings that are being called tea parties, as he attempts to stave off justice.

There’s something compelling about a locus of corruption like Nkandla, one that — unlike the disposable luxury goods, insane liquor bills and expensive holidays that are the other outward signs of corruption in SA — is fixed to a landscape as much as it is to history.

There are other places that feature on the map of the SA Guided Tour of the Corrupt and Famous. The Saxonwold Shebeen is one — the imaginary tavern invented by former Eskom CEO Brian Molefe to explain away evidence showing him visiting the Guptas’ compound more than 19 times, coincidentally some time before the Guptas received a R600m prepaid coal contract with Eskom.

For South Africans, the Saxonwold Shebeen stands in for the crude patronage bestowed by the Guptas as part of state capture, and for the craven behaviour of those who sold out to that family.

Another location that looms large is Dubai, home of Zuma’s alleged puppet masters, the Guptas, and his made-for-streaming son Duduzane. The world Duduzane flaunts on his social media, as described by Daily Maverick, includes speedboats, glistening skyscrapers, yachts, "a bevy of beautiful young women" and, according to the Sunday Times, an apartment bought for "R18m at the iconic skyscraper Burj Khalifa building".

There are many other locations exemplifying the corruption that has bedevilled our country that we could include on our map. But these three are perhaps the unholy trinity: the father’s Nkandla, the son’s Dubai, and the Guptas’ ghostly Saxonwold Shebeen.

Of them all, Nkandla is the one that carries the most meaning. It was, perhaps, the first really bald proof of the corruption and state capture that the country’s media and watchdog organisations had been pointing out on a piecemeal basis.

As a symbol, it’s easy to understand. Here is a man who would have loved to govern without accountability, and here is proof that state organisations were only too willing to aid and abet his criminality. This is why Nkandla, as a metaphor for corruption, refuses to lose its force. It’s our democracy’s Golgotha, as much as the Guptas’ largesse to Zuma was its 30 pieces of silver.