The facts remain confused, the allegations wild and numerous, but one can’t help feeling that Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is being grossly misrepresented in the media.
Firstly there is the issue of her alleged threat to “fix” fired deputy Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge and, in this case, no thinking South African can harbour any doubts about Tshabalala-Msimang’s innocence. Manto has not fixed anyone or anything in years, so why would she start now?
Then there are her alleged drinking habits, the charges of lush yodelling and papsak drips in hospital. In this instance one must withhold judgement until more evidence is rescued from health department shredders, but frankly the scandalised hullabaloo seems misplaced. If she did stamp her tiny feet and call people names, is she somehow more deserving of approbation than any of the other traffic-obstructing, tax-siphoning, buck-passing politicians who trample like hippos in Gucci through the national watering hole?
Besides, if the minister has what Sue-Ellen in Dallas used to call a “dringnprahblm”, she simply joins a long and illustrious tradition of highly skilled and dramatically blotto South African politicians, some of whom did their jobs with a steadier hand and a clearer eye while sozzled than Manto does hers stone cold sober. And if she doesn’t dop, and never has, and she decides to sting the Sunday Times for a few quid, one hopes she’ll toast her lawyer with a club soda and still have change left over to pop down to Fruit & Veg City to stock up on HIV repellent and a couple of new cauldrons.
Either way, a good woman knows her limitations, and nobody needs to remind Manto that she is unlikely to bound with girlish athleticism to the top of another transplant list. Enough said.
Next there is the outcry about the firing of Madlala-Routledge, with most media claiming that the deputy’s sacking will damage the state’s fight against Aids. This is patently not true. The firing of Madlala-Routledge will not damage the state’s fight against Aids, because there is no state fight against Aids. Syndromes can’t et cetera. Next point, please.
And so it goes, with this allegation met by that denial, these questions answered with those surly brush-offs. And all of it would have been fine, too — the healthy tension between an aggressive but optimistic media and a defensive but benign state — in any other week. But this week two little words, “principal” and “protagonist”, pushed up through the Manto mayhem and made one wonder whether there are more serious problems in the world than sobriety.
By now the report will have been altered, or buried under a pile of death certificates at Frere Hospital, but earlier this week it was startÂlingly public. The principal protagonist in “the Zimbabwean issue”, Thabo Mbeki was planning to tell the world, is the United Kingdom.
It could have been worse. He could have blamed Madlala-Routledge and her refusal to work as “part of a collective”. (One day Mbeki will watch a Star Trek film and discover that his entire vocabulary is borrowed from the Borg, alien nasties with a single collective mind and a limited sense of humour. Resistance is futile. We are Borg. Over to you, Kgalema.) But blaming Britain was fruity, nonetheless.
The Mbeki administration, the Post-Accountability Presidency, has made something of a habit of compelling the citizenry to ask ugly, desperate questions. Some of these are too familiar. For instance, does Mbeki’s state have any intention of providing genuine succour to Aids sufferers, or was a tacit understanding arrived at years ago that it would be easier and more cost-effective to let most die and start again at Ground Zero? Are whites African, or are they simply useful taxpaying squatters to be hauled up or lowered depending on the prevailing political winds? Is the press free, or is it free only for as long as it sniffs under the skirts of perceived traitors?
And this week, one had to ask: Is the president committed to democracy, or is he committed to Robert Mugabe? The two are, after all, mutually exclusive. Quiet Diplomacy — the immoral pandering of those more interested in patronage and their legacies than the wellbeing of the people on whose shoulders they climbed to power in South Africa — is now as macabre as the last rites being yapped into megaphones by Crazy “Half Price” Bob.
But perhaps that’s okay, because we’re no longer at the Quiet Diplomacy stage. Some time ago Quiet Diplomacy simply went Quiet. Currently it is an order: Quiet! But if we’re starting to blame Blair and Brown, we’re talking a whole new breed of loony. Lead in the water loony. Syphilis loony. African potatoes loony.
Is this the start of a brief Quiet Endorsement? Will it end in 2008 as Deafening Adulation, when Mugabe steps down and retires to a bulletproof chateau on the Cape coast bought by the South African taxpayer?
I need a drink.