So it’s open season on Pravin Gordhan again, what with the Guptas firing off press releases and then their answering affidavit to Gordhan’s appeal to the courts last year to stop the Guptas trying to use him to get SA’s big banks doing business with them again. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that the Guptas intend suing Gordhan for plotting to ruin them, citing a meeting held with top business leaders in Sandton soon after he was recalled to treasury in December 2015. As I recall, Gordhan was invited to that meeting by its host, Jabu Mabuza, as part of an effort to go to Davos the following month and, as a united business/government/labour front, try to ward off a ratings downgrade. This was all just weeks after the Guptas had tried unsuccessfully to get David Des van Rooyen made finance minister. In fact, as we all know, they succeeded for four days before President Jacob Zuma was forced to retreat. It is going to take an extremely gullible court to take anything the Guptas offer in their defence seriously. Van Rooyen was at their home for practically the entire week preceding his brief appointment.
The onslaught on Gordhan also coincides with renewed signs (as though we needed more) of the divisions in the top leadership of the ANC. The Star in Johannesburg runs a story this morning reporting that Zuma has attacked co-leaders like deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa and secretary-general Gwede Mantashe for calling for lifestyle audits for top ANC people. They should, the paper quotes Zuma, “behave properly”. The ANC, under Zuma’s wise guidance, is in fact leading the fight against corruption, he seemed to say. Sadly, the attack on Gordhan and Zuma’s attacks on ANC leadership candidates for December’s elective conference who are not Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma will go on and on. If I were Cyril, I’d be staying home right now. The battleground is rural branches — fake ones, newly created ones and old ones. You have to get to them to win.
Last week ended with the rumour mill going flat out about an imminent cabinet reshuffle. Dlamini-Zuma finishes up at the African Union this week and Zuma, the mill has it, wants to make her a cabinet minister. It was rather wildly assumed he would swap out Gordhan for her but that is just so preposterous I refuse to believe it. There’s a budget to deliver next month, for a start. Still, he will need to put some resources at her disposal — a team of people, a budget. Call her the minister of general affairs or something vague. It will just be for the year.
Business Day had a nice lead on Gordhan’s ordeal on its front page today. And great columns from Stuart Theobald and Justice Malala put the Guptas and the Zumas and the Gordhans nicely into context. I have to say it was only when I read Malala’s column this morning that I realised my name had been dragged into the fighting and dirty tricks. I must try to keep up.
I was very amused to read Ranjeni Munusamy this morning. She has discovered that Zuma turned down a request for a meeting with Donald Trump in New York last year. Oh dear. The one thing Trump does well is hold a grudge. Let’s hope he sends us an interesting ambassador.
Finding someone with the appropriate prejudices for SA may take a while yet and Trump is still finding his way around the White House after Friday’s inauguration. He made what just has to rank as one of the worst speeches ever. By Sunday the people around him were beginning to calm him down but he is so thin-skinned and volatile they will never be able to relax.
And while I appreciate fact-checkers and the need for them in our post-truth fake news world, there’s got to be something over the top about this piece from The New York Times, which fact-checked the Trump weekend. My advice would be this. We know there is something seriously wrong with Trump. He lies on camera and then flatly denies having said what he said. Who does that? Perhaps just pick out the really big fake facts and forget the little ones? Nah, I realise as I write this that everything has to be recorded. So, good for The New York Times.
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