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The slugging fight that happened this week between Adv Dali Mpofu and Pravin Gordhan, while on the surface it was about Tom Moyane and his disastrous time in SARS, was so much more: it was an attempt to resurrect the Rogue Unit narrative from his eternal grave.
First published in the weekly Daily Maverick 168.
It was also possibly the culmination of a three-year project to try to make us somehow forget what happened during the Zuma years and accept that everything we learned about the depth and scope of the State Capture was not true, a lie. of a wicked few and perpetuated by corrupt means.
That the reality of Zuma’s disastrous reign is completely the opposite means nothing to them.
In the first days after Zuma’s resignation, I was wrong when I thought Jacob’s willing executioners would walk away. He hoped that they were mistakenly ashamed of being corrupt accomplices. However, it never happened. Apart from their ultimate bosses, the Guptas, they stayed in the country to fight. And they fought back viciously that they did.
It is not easy to precisely define why these, let’s loosely call them RET forces, are fighting back in this way, but it is probably a combination of:
Without seeing that they did anything wrong in the Zuma years;
Knowing that what they were doing was wrong, but hey, the shame is so last century; Y
Understand that in South Africa the truth no longer matters, but the balance of power within the main ANC structures does matter. So if they manage to defend themselves that way, Gupta Christmas and Duduzane Easter will arrive early next year.
It is difficult to estimate how directly connected or targeted RET soldiers are and how optimized are their individual interests; Ace Magashule, Julius Malema and Iqbal Survé, for example, are extremely unlikely to be aligned on their views and desired outcomes.
But what is clear even to outsiders is that the RET army is fighting like hell to make South Africans forget what happened during the Zuma years.
They lie, attack, obfuscate, confuse. Sometimes they do the trolling themselves, like Matshela Koko (the one from “I didn’t know Eskom gave my stepdaughter hundreds of millions in contracts” fame), Tony “I love expensive cars” Yengeni, Mzwandile “my friend Malema is right “Masina, the entire EFF management, Iqbal” everyone who criticizes me is racist and I was Mandela’s doctor “Survé, prominent” journalists “who a few years ago were used as attack dogs while working for large media , and too many others to list here.
These royal individuals are also aided by an army of bots that are permanently unleashed to smear their opponents, tarnish the memories of the people of SA, and push forward a reworked new version of recent SA history. The one where the problems only started with Cyril Ramaphosa, where Eskom, TransNet, Denel, and every other SoE or government department ran like clockwork when Zuma was president and the Guptas were business “leaders.”
In the real world, these departments were run more like a clockwork orange, destined to explode in the near future.
Everyone is counting on the fact that public amnesia is definitely one thing and that it could happen in South Africa too. And they have many encouraging examples to point to, such as the United States forgetting Trump’s many bankruptcies (moral and financial), India not remembering the role Narendra Modi played in the 2002 Gujarat riots that left thousands dead, and countries in Europe. from the East who voted repeatedly. back to power communists / socialists, even when they were intensely hated as Russian puppets only a few election cycles before.
And that’s where one of our primary roles, as the media, lies in this turbulent time / space: we cannot allow the people of South Africa to forget what Zuma and his cohort stand for. We must remind this brutalized country why we are here and why, instead of having the strong economy we deserve when we face the pandemic, government coffers are empty and its ability to act is seriously diminished. We need to keep talking about the damage to morale and the deformation of the value system of the entire country that was inflicted by Zuma’s army of sages. We must continue to uncover corruption and incompetence.
Ours is and will continue to be tortuous and sometimes soul-destroying work. Sometimes the onslaught of misinformation that is reinforced by the frontal attack of real life villains is not easy to deal with. But if you have chosen to serve your country as part of the media, you can never allow yourself to be tired or demoralized. We fight for the truth, yeah But fighting for the truth in times of chaos and discord is also fighting for the very survival of South Africa as a modern democracy. By accepting this mandate, we also accept responsibility like no other. DM168
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