BRUCE'S LIST: The torment of Nkosazana’s ex — finding her a new job with a big budget

Bruce’s List: A guide to informed reads.

If the political scene is this noisy 12 months ahead of the ANC elective conference in December, can you imagine what November is going to look like? It will be an absolute fog of accusation, counteraccusation, fake news and fist fights as slates and individuals and premiers and has-beens line up to replace Jacob Zuma as leader of the party.

Thus far Cyril Ramaphosa has been publicly backed by Cosatu and has himself said he is available for the job. Zuma’s ex-wife and outgoing AU Commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has been effusively endorsed by the ANC Women’s League and Zuma. Totally peeved at being excluded, ANC chair and speaker of the National Assembly Baleka Mbete gave a long interview to the Sunday Times last weekend in which she “revealed” that thousands of people had urged her to stand and that she had decided, since they had asked nicely, to make herself available.

Also at the weekend a curious incident occurred when Zuma sort of gate-crashed an event being led by ANC treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize. He had previously said he wouldn’t be there, but such is Zuma’s torment now, as it becomes harder and harder to guarantee his chosen successor gets the job, that he dare not let his senior colleagues go freely about their business. Their business is very much his.

Of all the people actually or potentially in line for this succession, Mkhize looks to me like the most plausible compromise, and that would be no bad thing at all for SA.

Still, you get an idea of the swirl of politics — and the reason for Zuma’s unease — from this page-one lead in The Star yesterday. And that was before Mbete, having quite evidently thrown her hat into the ring in the Sunday Times at the weekend, then had to try and extricate herself from the ring in an interview with Xolani Gwala on Talk Radio 702 this morning. In this game, you put your hand up, go to the follow-up meeting where you all agree there will be no more putting up of hands until later, announce that and then get on with the fact that you’re officially a candidate. It must be excruciating. It certainly is for the rest of us. Here’s 702’s interview with Mbete this morning.

While all this is going on, Zuma has to find a way to get Dlamini-Zuma back into cabinet, thus initiating a reshuffle many people have been expecting for months. What job do you give her? It’s hard to think of anything that would not immediately mire her in failure other than foreign affairs. Housing? Health? Education? Nah — there’ll be none of that. The problem is that a Zuma favourite is already foreign affairs minister. What would he do with Maite Nkoana-Mashabane? Perhaps he’ll invent something grand. A president with a cabinet of nearly 80 people must have some skill in the multiplier department.

The important thing, as UDM leader Bantu Holomisa suggested yesterday, is to get Dlamini-Zuma, who finishes up at the AU on January 27, into a position where she would command some state resources. She’ll need a healthy travel budget for a start — getting to ANC branches ahead of the December conference is a complex and exhausting project. Mind you, the Guptas helped Zuma do just that when he was in the wilderness. Perhaps, seeing as they made Dlamini-Zuma South African of the Year in 2015, they might offer her the same facilities now. They may, but the outcome is nowhere nearly as certain and the candidate nowhere nearly as needy of the Gupta largesse. I think. 

Meanwhile, as the ever-wise Max du Preez reminds us, we have to watch for the lies that will inevitably squirm around this gigantic struggle for power in the ANC. This power play has so long to run it cannot possibly play out cleanly. It will be fun to watch, but I hope my colleagues in the media are able to keep it as clear of bacteria as possible.

The old Absa lifeboat story has resurfaced — this time with a vigour, as it is not unrelated to the Zuma succession battle. The Guptas and their many lickspittles in what is called “paid Twitter” are trying to use it as an excuse to deflect public attention from the capture of the Zuma administration. But it is also clearly an issue of authentic public interest.

Absa, by virtue of having acquired Bankorp in the late 1980s, may owe the public purse some R2bn, as Bankorp had been in receipt of secret rescue payments before and after it was bought. The issue has been credibly investigated by the democratic authorities in the past, but former public protector Thuli Madonsela completed a (further) draft report into the matter before she left office last year, and it has just been leaked.

Typically, the public protector’s office prefers to circulate its drafts to the people involved before making them public, just in case any of the people involved have something worthy to add. This has not yet happened. Both the Reserve Bank and Absa have until late February to reply. But the delay is a convenient gap in which to make some trouble if you are intent upon it.

What is fascinating about the draft, which I have not seen, is that Madonsela appears to have taken evidence from former Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals, who apparently says Absa agreed back then, in writing, to pay back the sum of the lifeboat with interest. That would be sensational it if were true, but even this good report from Daily Maverick doesn’t seem to be sure. The first journalist to get Stals on the record in this gets a bottle of real champagne from me.

I thought the Business Day editorial this morning on the lifeboat was really good. Compare the sneaky way in which money was spent propping up Bankorp to the open, transparent mechanisms used to rescue African Bank more recently and you get an idea of how much we have improved as a society. Not that Stals was necessarily operating outside of the prevailing mores in central banking.

As a correspondent in Madrid in the 1980s, I would often visit the Bank of Spain building. Its corridors were lined with some of the greatest works of art on earth. I remember, particularly, its collection of Goyas. In fact, the Bank of Spain could reasonably be listed as one of the world’s great art galleries. I once asked the then governor, Mariano Rubio, where the art came from. He said it was from bank rescues — every time the central bank bailed out a commercial bank it would extract payment by making off with the rescued bank’s art collection!