It’s a pity that a hard-working woman’s year will be remembered for little more than her flying habits.
Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s year started on a high-flying note — and it has ended in exactly the same way. In January, she hit the runway rolling as a holiday to Dubai aboard a defence force jet got up the nation’s nose.
She ends her year flat on her face, too. Mlambo-Ngcuka, it was revealed this week, has travelled aboard at least five chartered jets this year. The South African National Defence Force, responsible for the presidency’s travel, has chartered the aircraft because it does not have pilots to fly its own. So we’ve spent at least R8-million jetting her excellency to work.
We may not be a banana republic, but we certainly are fruity.
Some desk-jockey in the military is going to take the rap for sanctioning the deputy president’s trip. Poor fool. He or she probably expected to be promoted instead.
The culture of political bling, in the form of jets, convoys and R96 000 lunches, has become deeply entrenched in South Africa. The only reason Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota has called an inquiry into the latest case is to manoeuvre himself to a safe distance from a political stinker.
But our leaders must not be too complacent — the popular tide is turning against bling culture. The high-living of ministers and mayors is increasingly being scrutinised, and becoming a source of resentment, in a country where just less than half the population lives on the poverty line.
And so it should be — no matter what the apologists of the Commission on Gender Equality or the ruling party might say.
Mlambo-Ngcuka is not the hapless target of Jacob Zuma supporters in the defence force hierarchy who want to nail her because she dared step into Zuma’s shoes. She is not being set up for failure, as the gender commission came out of its profound slumber to declare this week.
Every time citizens raise a stink about the high-flying lives of public representatives the rule book is thrown at them.
Security demands require that the president and his deputy not take commercial flights, we are told. The deputy president’s security detail denied her request to travel on a commercial flight. But for Pete’s sake, this is not Afghanistan, Iraq or the Democratic Republic of Congo. South Africa is a non-aligned nation at peace with its neighbours and, generally, with the world. What security threat?
And who calls the shots? The boys in black who borrow their style from trashy movies?
In the case of lavish lives lived on the public purse, we are told provincial ministers have the right to entertain. Yes, but at the conspicuous consumption levels we constantly witness? Surely not?
It’s time to throw out the apartheid rule book and discover the public humility appropriate to a middle-income country with the widest wealth gap in the world.
What’s wrong with flying first class on any of the carriers that wing their way out of OR Tambo International? Political bling is expensive, financially and politically. Let’s cut off the chains.
An exercise in folly
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has to watch his back against the clerical hardliners who hold real power in Iran. But neither political self-insurance nor any depth of outrage over Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians can excuse the two-day conference on the Holocaust in Tehran this week. It was an exercise in grossly insensitive folly.
The conference, Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision, was billed by the Iranian government as scientific scholarship. But one might as well convene a conference on whether World War II happened. If one can be sure of any historical occurrence, it is the Nazi genocide of European Jews — the evidence, physical, photographic and textual, from survivors, Allied liberators and the Nazis themselves — simply cannot be rationally questioned. Yet Ahmadinejad has already decided otherwise  last year he notoriously declared the Holocaust “a myth”. And any residual pretensions to academic objectivity were immediately shot to pieces by the rogue’s gallery of Holocaust deniers who turned up at the event, including former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke.
The connection with Israel was explicit: Iranian officials argue that the Holocaust is used to justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, and Israel/Palestine was placed on the conference agenda. Quite apart from the offence to death camp survivors and Jews generally, this is a political blunder of the first magnitude. It plays into the hands of those who dishonestly conflate outspoken opposition to the Israeli government with anti-Semitism. And it must further persuade reasonable people that the Iranian leadership is unhinged, untrustworthy and/or unfamiliar with international human rights norms.
This week Israeli Premier Ehud Olmert spilled the beans by confirming Israel had a nuclear deterrent. By rights, this should have turned a spotlight on the West’s discriminatory nuclear policies — if Israel has the bomb, why not Iran? But a string of Iranian gaffes like the Holocaust conference make it much more difficult to raise such objections. Why, it will be asked, should one entrust doomsday weapons to wild-eyed ideologues who appear to hate with such passionate intensity, while knowing so little of the world?