THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
`You’re not wanting to talk about that driving licence thing, are you?” questioned Ina, the formidable secretary for Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile, when I requested an interview with her boss. “If you are, then I’ll stand six feet tall to protect her. The whole thing has been blown totally out of proportion.”
Well, that was just one of several issues I wanted to discuss with Parliament’s Deputy Speaker. So I arrived at her spacious office at the National Assembly in Cape Town, worried that I might be thrown out for bringing up the subject.
I was met in the lobby by Ina, a statuesque blonde who described herself as a “Suid Afrikaner” when I asked if she was French. She reminded me of a traditional praise- singer, gushing liberally about what a “sweet” and “lovely person” Mbete- Kgositsile is.
Madam Deputy Speaker sailed out of her inner sanctum to greet me, looking slightly hassled. It was her father’s 80th birthday and she was planning an impromptu party. But there was a snag with the cake. Ina said the shop wouldn’t keep it without a deposit.
What are things coming to when a baker can’t cut a little slack for a busy member of Parliament? After all, the provincial traffic director in Mpumalanga dragged himself from his sick bed to test her.
Anyway, let’s just get the driving licence business out of the way, shall we? Though loath to talk about it, Mbete-Kgositsile, who sat with her arms folded in her lap – defensively, I thought – for most of our meeting, insisted she had not willingly done anything wrong. “At the time I did not know it was illegal to take my test in another province. Not even the Minister of Safety and Security [Sydney Mufamadi] realised it.” She claimed to have applied for the licence in good faith and completed all the normal tests.
“I just wish this whole thing would go away,” she said plaintively. “I have told the truth, but no one wants to hear it.” It sounded like a cry in the wilderness.
Mbete-Kgositsile (47) also denied having said, Leona Helmsley-style (remember the New York hotel queen’s “only little people pay taxes”?), that she was too busy to queue like other citizens for her driving test. “That’s ridiculous, I don’t have anything against queuing. I do it all the time.” I pictured her standing in line at the Post Office with her bodyguards.
What about the second wave of controversy, over her application for a new identity book? “There was no question on the document asking if I held a valid licence, or of my trying to pretend that I had one. I’m abiding by the findings of the inquiry that it was illegally issued and will take another test, but I’m not in any particular hurry.” She then curtly referred me to her May 24 statement on the affair.
The Deputy Speaker has unequivocally apologised to the public for having used her official position to fast-track procedures, but she could not accept that it was an abuse of power. “I was trying to organise my time in the most efficient way,” she insisted. “I did nothing to resign about.”
She clearly sees herself as an innocent victim caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately for her, a large number of people do not. If she could not see it was morally wrong to accept such privileges, said one white male lawyer, at best she was gormless.
Baleka Mbete-Kgositsile (like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the double-barrel came after her divorce) was born in Claremont, Durban, the second child and eldest daughter of a Fort Hare University librarian father and a nurse.
She was to discover many years later that her father had worked underground for the communist party. “President Mandela also told me that when he was a law student in Johannesburg, my father used to get books for him.”
It was in the 1970s, while working as a language teacher (she spoke isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English and isiZulu) during the time of the Black Consciousness Movement, that she started in youth politics. “I was organising students in KwaMashu, but was not a member of any political party.” It was not until her 1976 exile that she joined the African National Congress.
The journey into exile came in the wake of the student unrest and a number of high- profile arrests. “I had been in and out of interrogations when my brother, who was in detention, sent word that I was about to be detained. He suggested I leave the country.”
But it was a very difficult decision because she was a single mother with two young children, aged four months and a year and four months. Within a week she was on her way to Swaziland – the children followed soon afterwards.
Tanzania was her next port of call, where in 1978 she worked as a broadcaster for Radio Freedom. While posted in Kenya, she married Keorapetse Kgositsile, an ANC activist and university lecturer.
Then came what she described as “the best time” – being based in Botswana. “It was like being home … you could smell home. Even the climate, landscape and culture was similar; and of course home was not far away.” But Zimbabwe (1986) and Lusaka (1987), where she was elected to the national executive of the women’s section as administrative secretary, were to follow before she could set foot on home soil again.
“It was confusing, traumatic and overwhelming,” she said about her return. “I never wanted to leave, and had resisted all attempts to be sent to Europe.”
Like most activists, she has paid a personal price for the struggle. Her 14- year marriage broke up due to the strain of her climb up the political ladder, three years after the family returned to South Africa in 1990.
Perhaps her biggest regret is not having spent enough time with her children while they were growing up. Most distressing for her is the fact that her 18-year-old son Duma seems to have caught the fall-out. “It is one of the saddest things for me that he has been in and out of mental hospital for the past three years.”
Duma, who has tried to commit suicide once, suffers from depression exacerbated by having to confront racism in South Africa. “The children did not know of racism before coming here, when they had to face being called baboons and kaffir on the street and in school.”
Curiously, she talks about meeting and discussing issues with her kids “as a collective”, rather as if she was holding an ANC caucus meeting. She laughed when I pointed this out.
She has been described as one of the brightest women in Parliament, so I asked if she did not want a Cabinet position. “Most people think all the Speaker and her deputy do is control debates in the National Assembly, but we are also very involved in transforming Parliament and the training of MPs, which is important for the efficient working of government.”
On this subject she was effusive, with none of the reticence displayed when discussing the licence. Then she had been clearly uncomfortable and maybe thought she had said too much.
In any case Ina telephoned a day after the interview to remind me the affair was still going through “the process” and Mbete- Kgositsile wanted me to stick to her previously published statements. I heard the tone of censure in Ina’s voice that the subject had been discussed, and perhaps a desire to send that “six feet wall” crashing down on my head.