Around the end of next month a novel of mine is being published. Songs of the Cockroach is set in the Cape Town of 2004 and takes a wistful look at various corrupt or absurd enterprises, the sometimes abominable people driving them three years from now. Some of the characters are those remnants of the old National Party, still hustling and stealing their way
through political life but under the very serviceable camouflage of the Democratic Alliance.
It is of course a calculated risk to write about any political grouping as it might be three years hence, especially in the light of the recent shenanigans in the Cape Town mayoral offices. Will there still be a DA come 2004? Well, the jury’s out on that but whatever does happen, the DA of the future – should it survive its endogenous pathologies – will be a lot different to the one we know and admire so much today.
Perhaps the DA of the future will have learnt some acceptable political manners, some way of doing things that isn’t as crudely disfigured as its behaviour has been over the last weeks. Special attention should be given to the DA leader Tony Leon’s political table manners, which are sorely in need of improvement.
Leon has always been very vocal on the matter of everyone’s else’s corruption; indeed much of his hustings flatulence has been and continues to be about how honest and impeccable are all the various components of his precious alliance. What puzzles is how the same preachy Tony Leon managed, for weeks on end, to ignore the secondary fiasco of the DA-led “investigation” into the leery street renaming exercise. From that Friday in June when the fraudulent votes and petitions first got prominent exposure in this newspaper, it is amazing how Leon kept his distance until such time as his impeccable instincts told him to step in and make a great big self-righteous public feast out of it.
The DA’s investigation of the street renaming affair has been easily as corrupt as anything they might have been trying to mollify – never mind reveal. I specifically exclude the Judge Heath component of the affair as that has been, for the first time, overt and balanced. But before Heath came on the scene, the DA-run Cape Town Unicity political establishment, faced with its own and very apparent iniquities, decided the appropriate thing to do would be to investigate itself.
This resulted in a veritable whore’s banquet of conflicting committees, probing forums and all the rest of the typically befuddled panic mechanisms of those caught with their fingers in the till.
It was bleakly entertaining, as for a few weeks the mayoral officials went into full-on whinge-mode. They started by claiming that the dodgy votes and petitions were part of some obscure ANC plot designed to embarrass the Democratic Alliance – as if the ANC have ever demonstrated an eighth of the level of imagination that would have been necessary for such an antic. It was only a matter of time before the obligatory racist whistle was blown. Mayor Peter Marais himself was to claim that the whole fiasco was clear evidence that white Capetonians hadn’t “transformed”, despite his inspired leadership.
Even the poor old Mail & Guardian got plastered for having broken the story.
What stood out as the most grotesque of all the manoeuvres was that the very same individual, Cape Town Unicity legal adviser Ben Kieser, one of those who now stand accused of fraudulent vote-rigging and could well be the driving force behind the whole dismal cozenage, was himself set to drawing up the terms of reference (principally to find out who had “leaked” the story to the M&G) for a one-man commission of enquiry which he himself chose and appointed. His henchman, Johan Smit, was set to the distribution of yet more fantasies to the public. It’s known that dogs return to their own vomit; here they were rolling in it.
All of this blatant chicanery was watched – from a safe distance – by the great and wise Mr Leon. True, he did privately ask Marais to write him an explanatory letter, but when it came to stepping in and stopping what was a patently obvious cover-up, nary a peep from the oracle.
Then came the breach in the dam, the affidavit of Victoria Johnson, shown in the strictest of confidentiality to the Democratic Alliance’s deputy mayor, Belinda Walker, who immediately rushed it off to Leon. Without bothering about such niceties as Johnson’s rights in the matter – let alone asking her permission – Tony Leon then violated the confidentiality and bust the whole thing wide open in a specially convened press conference.
Here was political advantage to be gained, a way of strutting one’s moral stature too tempting for Tony Leon to ignore. Bugger the damage to Johnson’s reputation, her personal safety. She was just another bit of grist to the ravenous Leon mill. If this affair has proved anything it is how the DP component of the Democratic Alliance has brought down the tone of the Nats.
It was once said about Harold Wilson and it applies just as well today. There are two things I dislike about Tony Leon – his face.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby