In starting up their own parties, Patricia de Lille and Peter Marais are indulging a long-established fashion in irrelevant politics. Not that the Pan Africanist Congress — from which Ms de Lille has withdrawn her often hypocritical expediencies — has ever been anything to write home about when it came to relevance.
The PAC’s never been much more than a philosophical base for that brand of freedom fighters who enjoy shooting up lonely bars and Sunday-evening church services.
I certainly don’t think Marais should be starting up a new party. All he need do is sit back and wait for Marthinus van Schalkwyk to come to his senses and invite him back into the New Nats. By the time Peter’s fraud and corruption charges are safely out of the way, Kortbroek’s grimy faction will be desperately in need of increase. You know a political party’s in a bad way when eventually even a Sheila Camerer finds its political accommodation too noisome.
Something must have gone seriously wrong because Sheila’s been quite happy for many a year, faithfully decomposing along with all the other political corpses in the Nat crypt. Kortbroek might be losing a very senior stiff but the Democratic Alliance is gaining a matching blonde bookend for Dene Smuts. Can’t you just see the two of them, sitting in the DA benches desperately trying to out-embalm each other?
Who else in our astonishing battery of contemporary politicians would do better to abandon their parties and set up on their own?
The first name that springs to mind is, of course, the honourable Minister of Something-or-Other Alec Erwin, or as he’s known in the presidency, the White Man for All Seasons. Alec would do well to set up his own party, thereby sidestepping pending murder charges from the Treatment Action Campaign. Alec and Ronnie Kasrils could get together and launch the New Contemptibles.
Before going on I want to repeat a very sad joke going around at the moment. A deputy foreign minister walks into a bar with a giant adenoid attached to his head. The alarmed barman asks: ‘How did that happen?” And the adenoid says: ‘ I don’t know. It started as a pimple on my arse.”
Another, enjoying celebrity status in the ruling party is, of course, our most gregarious comedian, Aziz Pahad. Recently Aziz has become the darling of the Limpopo Occasional Ba’ath Party and would take a lot of people with him if he resigned his post and set up the South African Saddamites.
Think of all the human shields who would flock to his aid. Aziz could of course opt to stay with the winner and simply keep rank with his ministerial boss, who, it is rumoured, is about to form her own one-termagant party, the NkosaZanu-PFP.
Other top guns on the move include Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi, who is said to be setting up the New Inter-Congolese Dialogue Peace and Reconciliation Party (Ongoing) (NICDPRP(0)). Syd’s headquarters will be at Sun City.
Once Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s been declared entirely innocent of the horrendous set of deeply racist arms-deal corruption accusations, which the SABC still ignores, there’s a good chance he’ll be setting up in competition to see whether the Burundi peace talks can be as expensive and fruitless as Sydney’s have.
There must be dozens of parliamentarians ripe for a stab at a solo career. Those sweltering in the African National Congress have no chance whatsoever of being fired.
In today’s ANC you can thieve, lie, swindle and generally dissimulate to your heart’s content. No matter how obvious and fetid the scam, not one of the comrades will ever suggest you piss off. The higher the rank, the cruder the political felony, the more sanctimonious the snow job from Smuts Ngonyama. So any ANC MP mad enough to want to abandon a sinecure of such forgiving dimensions will have to fire himself or herself with no help from any of ANC committees or mandarins.
Except for Winnie, that is. Winnie occupies a unique position in the ANC. As Rumpole would say: She Who Must Be Obeyed. Winnie Mandela has for some time been a one-madam affair.
She might allow all manner of political low-life to cough in her dust, but when it comes to independence, she outstrides them all. If there is point at all in going solo as a parliamentarian, Winnie’s Way long since revealed it.
MP’s such as Connie Mulder and Bantu ‘Thank You Master” Holomisa have harvested the benefits of being either one- or two-part star turns.
As elected parliamentarians such moral outposters get the large offices, the staff, the air fares, the luxury cars, the accommodation, the ridiculous salaries and, according to Mark Heywood, plenty of free anti-retrovirals, all in return for being of no administrative or legislative significance whatsoever.
Theirs is a worthy example. It must surely be clear to any MP that now is the ideal time to dismiss the pimp and take to the political streets on one’s own. This is not always ineffective. Look how well Helen Suzman did.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby