Pieter-Louis Myburgh's exposé of (yet another case of) corruption deserves a monument

Daily Maverick

4 days ago

Writing a column can be extremely difficult sometimes. At least for me it is. As much as I enjoy the act of writing, the gestation of ideas can take several days. My approach is always to step out of the traffic, get a birds-eye view of things, give them meaning and situate them — always trying to capture the differing light dispersion — and then write about them.
Sometimes when you sit down to write about things and you see how they land, you get a sense of the perceptual distortion, of the violence of reality, and how it forces you back to the keyboard.
Consider the following analogy.
When you view cars travelling on a highway from high above, they appear to be going slowly, but step onto the actual highway, and you literally feel the force of the speeding cars.
I gained the same sense from my very limited playing time in ice hockey (I was rubbish at it). It's a beauty to behold a game from the stands high above the arena where you see patterns and flows — you even see plays emerge before they actually do — but step on the ice and it's an entirely different thing. The illusion of stillness is quickly shattered when a two-metre tall guy from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, slams you into the boards — that's when you re-evaluate your life choices. Really.
And so I come to my initial intent for this week's contribution, and the 'high-level' idea I was mulling over — race-based policies and what the government has been doing to reverse things like job reservation, or quotas for black people in higher learning.
Recruitment drive
Seriously, check out this statement from the time when the National Party was on a white-people recruitment drive in the Netherlands during the 1950s.
'Work reservation is essential for the decent type of immigrant who does not want to become mixed up with people of a lower mentality… We have a law in South Africa called 'work reservation' under which our Whites are protected, and I can assure the speaker and the others present that if White ' ambagsmanne ' [tradesmen] come to South Africa, they will be protected.'
Then dropped Pieter-Louis Myburgh's videographic expos é of (yet another case of) corruption.
So flagrant were the would-be bribe givers that their grotesquery ought to be enshrined in a statue and given a place of prominence in Pretoria to remind future generations of the weaker moments of our young democracy.
Wearing my other hat, I have written about and studied the way monuments or statues of 'great men' (Metal Men on Horseback) dotted the European landscape, ostensibly to valorise them, when it really is about power (my inquiry was about war and its impact on social consciousness) and what we believe is important to remember.
Consider the declaration, in support of erecting an 'equestrian statue' of England's King George on Manhattan Island: it was 'to perpetuate to the latest Posterity, the deep Sense this Colony has of the eminent and singular Blessings received from him during his most auspicious reign'.
The 'reign' of the ANC has become inauspicious.
The scene at the table in the video of Pieter-Louis Myburgh, the Independent Development Trust's recently suspended CEO, Tebogo Malaka, and the entity's spokesperson, Phasha Makgolane, reminded me (immediately) of the bronze-work by sculptor Eric de Saint-Chaffrey of a game of Manille between César and Panisse, characters in Marcel Pagnol's Marseille Trilogy.
For what it's worth. I have enormous soft spots for Hamal Heykeli, the bronze statue of a traditional porter carrying a heavy load, and of the Monument to Draper or Craftsmen, both in the Fatih District of Istanbul, and for the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman sculpture in Moscow — which makes a change from the monuments and memorials dedicated to warriors and military leaders, which I wrote about in this space previously.
The value of such a monument to our weaker moments should serve as a reminder to future generations of just what the state had become after the first 'activist leaders' of Nelson Mandela's administration eventually gave up and left politics.
Here's an anecdote. About 29 years and six months ago, a suggestion was made (by a public servant) that a particular state department hold a Christmas party for staff. The head of that department said something like this: 'Imagine that there are one million public servants in South Africa. If we spent R10 per person on a Christmas party, that would be a waste of R10-million of taxpayers' money. We have more important things to do.'
What has happened on the ice, or on the highways (in the above analogies) since those days of optimism has been a shock to the system. Explaining it is easier than understanding it.
It reminds me that our efforts of rolling back the injustices of the past through (necessary but insufficient) race-based policies have inherent contradictions that we have probably failed to address properly. They have simply resulted in get-rich-quick schemes.
At some point (my informed guess is that it was after 2006), a door was opened and there was a repetition of sorts of what happened during the transition from Soviet communism to capitalism in Russia.
That transition was marked by 'lawless rapaciousness'. Anatoly Chubais, the architect of privatisation in Russia, said of the new capitalists at that time that 'they steal and steal and steal. They are stealing absolutely everything and it is impossible to stop them.'
Greed vs expectations
He imagined that things would get better; that they, the new private capitalists and owners of state-owned enterprises, would mature over time — but their greed never quite kept up with expectations.
During the Mandela administration and deep into the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, we shared those expectations. Pecuniary gain and get-rich-quick schemes saw a dramatic rise in the wealth of the political elite and cadres of the liberation movement.
We are reminded here of what Chubais said about privatisation when the new capitalists stole and stole and stole 'absolutely everything and it is impossible to stop them'. This helps us understand the inherent contradictions in the way that the ANC-in-government failed South Africa from not long after the outset.
This was when that most awful of justifications slipped into South African politics: ' I did not fight the Struggle to be poor.'
Smuts Ngonyama was right; we did not fight the Struggle to be poor. He was also wrong; we did not fight to get rich, but to improve the wellbeing, prosperity and safety of children and adults, the protection of women, and to generate high levels of trust among individuals and groups in South Africa.
Though I am nowhere close to (even the periphery of) the ruling party, spare a thought for those first-generation political leaders from the Mandela and Mbeki administrations.
Imagine, just for a minute, being president now, and waking up every day to a new scandal that is so far from your daily reach that being president is a bit like standing in the middle of a highway with cars flashing by, and you don't know where to look or what to think, and you remain in a constant state of panic, fear, confusion — and shock.