Robert Kirby : Loose Cannon
Squinting down from my ivory tower of white privilege, I am wont to say just how encouraged I am to be called a snobbish elitist, hardly distinguishable from a khaki-clad Neanderthal. What’s more, called all these names by someone who knows exactly what he’s talking about. And no, this column is not a churlish reaction to Jay Naidoo’s scrupulous apologia – published last week in the Mail & Guardian – responding to my criticisms about his new GovNet.
I am grateful to our garrulous telephone wallah because what he also did was nudge me into acknowledging that at last “privilege” is not principally the white man’s gift.
Bits of white privilege are already harvested. Isn’t a configuration of “privilege” when highly placed members of a new administration, regularly and often without any congruous penalty, behave exactly like the white political hoodlums they are supposed to have replaced?
Take that nice MEC lady up in the Northern Province who ripped off half a million of taxpayer’s money in order to fly her family and her bodyguard all first class to the Atlanta Olympics for a lavish jaunt. Has she ever been brought to book? Apart from the M&G making a great big racist fuss? I know she lost her job, but what about the R500 000. Why isn’t the African National Congress paying it back? They appointed her.
Chambers Dictionary has the noun “privilege” as “a happy advantage; freedom from burdens borne by others”. Which makes you wonder what else is pending. Did you read that elegantly argued piece (“A Short Leap to Dictatorship”) in last week’s M&G? Lizeka Mda – presumably from her own ivory tower – reminded us of that unfortunate affair where Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) counsellors were abusing their credit cards.
Caught with their arms in the till, the counsellors were summarily fired by means of a brutal three-months-with-full-pay-and-benefits notice. Not one of them has paid back a cent. One is on record as saying she never will.
What happened was that some quickly matured “privilege” jumped in through the window. Gaudy with outrage were government assurances that bitter retribution be showered on the counsellors for their larceny and deceit. Eager political janitors ran for their buckets. Two of the more prodigal IBA spendthrifts, Pieter de Klerk and Lyndall Shope-Mafole, were mercilessly punished with protective employment as top-dollar consultants in some minister of telecommunications’s office. The third was made head of Sentech.
Giving the finger to the paying public is, of course, all rather old hat. The previous government spent going on 50 years showing how easily even a soupon of power can go straight to the head. The Nats jiggled their political buddies off the hook no matter how atrociously they’d behaved, how profoundly they’d embezzled.
Where the Nats differ from the present lot is that now and then they bowed to public pressure, ran after, caught, convicted someone and sent him to jail. Including a Cabinet minister. They even dislodged a granite-browed state president.
“Privilege” can also be used to describe the exact opposite of zero tolerance. Robustly prosecuted, “privilege” eventually makes all crime respectable – something big and important men do. The use of political “privilege” tidily specifies things like Penuell Meduna refusing to do anything about Don Mkhwanazi; the fact that the pious Allan Boesak still hasn’t come up for trial; that the ANC still hasn’t paid back our health department all those millions Madam Nkosazana Zuma spent trying to get into show business. Mpumalanga housing scandals; fraudulent driver’s licences; closing down the Medicines Control Council when it refuses to toe the Virodene line … the list goes on and on.
Something in the way of a subversive reality was offered by a male white friend of mine. The other week he phoned me up and said: “I’ll give you any odds you like. Robert McBride walks away from this one.”
It’s the sort of remark we’ve all grown used to. Lightly said, but in oblique references actually quite scary. None of us yet know any but the vaguest details of the McBride matter. What is scary is the nature of people’s first reactions these days to such events.
If anything is potentially embarrassing to government assurances of clean and accountable administration, the first thing everyone expects is that someone up there will start lying about it. After they’ve done that, they usually go on to remind us that, given the right circumstances, democracy can most definitely become a privilege.