JUSTICE MALALA: How we became cheapened by our heroes and liberators

I have told this story a few times before, but it is just so good that I am going to tell it one more time. Please allow me. Just one more time. It’s back in the early 2000s. I get invited to a meeting with a Nigerian newspaperman in London. We agree to do breakfast on a Saturday. He was flying in from SA. I am sitting in the Dorchester Hotel salivating over the breakfast menu. The last time I ate there was with the late, great ANC youth leader and presidential spokesperson Parks Mankahlana. The eggs Benedict looked extremely appealing.

My breakfast date was late, so I stuck my nose in my book. My peace was disturbed by someone shouting: "What’s wrong with you South Africans?"

It was my breakfast date. He was holding a copy of that week’s Mail & Guardian in his hand. The paper revealed that our then deputy president, Jacob Zuma, had accepted a bribe of R500,000 to protect some arms deal beneficiaries from prosecution. My guest was appalled. Not at the corruption of our deputy president, but at the sheer lack of ambition of the man.

"This man has no pride! A deputy president of Africa’s richest economy taking a $50,000 bribe? Not even a minor politician’s mistress would accept that in Nigeria. Has the man no pride? If he is going to be corrupt, he should be more ambitious about it," he fumed.

The real scandal is how cheapened we are by people we once lauded as heroes and liberators

There are many ways to weigh up this story. Should Zuma have asked for more? Is that the objection? Because there is no doubt now that our politicians are embarrassingly cheap. This past weekend we learnt that Zuma was receiving R300,000 a month from Bosasa to help him with the upkeep of his various homes and spouses. The president of SA on retainer for corrupt activities. Wow. Our good friend Nomvula Mokonyane, now the minister of environmental affairs, allegedly received meat, booze and party trinkets.

It makes you want to weep. Is the freedom that Albert Luthuli and Walter Sisulu and so many others fought for so cheap?

However, I don’t know if things would have seemed more palatable if Zuma and Co had taken bigger sums from their corrupt benefactors.

Last week it was reported that the former president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, took a $100-million bribe from Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous crime lord known as El Chapo, according to a witness at the gangster’s trial.

Yes, that’s R1.4bn at the going rate.

If you think that’s a lot, consider the case of Najib Razak, Malaysia’s former prime minister, who in September 2018 was charged with 21 counts of money laundering for allegedly receiving £500m from 1MDB, the Malaysia development fund, into his personal bank account. Yes, that’s £500m into his personal bank account. It’s the sort of transfer that makes your banker start hyperventilating.

Meanwhile, our Zuma is going to go down for taking a mere $50,000 bribe from Schabir Shaik all those years ago. Then there’s all the other, newer stuff.

Would it make it better, perhaps more understandable, if Zuma had taken a bigger sum of money? Would it make it better if the ANC had gone for a bigger stash (like the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen by the Sani Abachas of this world)?

No. The scandal here is not the amount of money. The real scandal is how cheapened we are by people we once lauded as heroes and liberators. Everything about us is so cheapened. Our democracy. Our faith and hope. The ANC has cheapened our dream.

And oh, what a glorious dream it was. We said we would build a new humanity down here on the southern tip. We said we would show the world what a nonracial, nonsexist, people-centred society would look like.

Yet what we are seeing and hearing from the state capture commission of inquiry, what we have learnt about the Gavin Watsons and the Guptas and the ANC and its leaders, is so coarse and cheap that it makes you wonder whether — and how — we will find our way back.