KwaZulu-Natal Premier S’bu Ndebele is not the tallest man in the leadership structures of the province. So this week, during the 10th African Renaissance Conference in Durban, he tried to stand on the shoulders of giants.
He did so in a terribly edited video — ostensibly a tribute to the recently deceased American civil rights activist Reverend James Orange — commissioned by his office and screened at the Africa Day concert on Sunday and again on Monday during the conference itself. Made by a Mandla Dube, a consultant in the premier’s office, it was an embarrassing exercise in inflating Ndebele’s political stature. It casts Ndebele as the standard-bearer of Nelson Mandela’s legacy as he interminably relates an anecdote about Madiba interrogating his own Afrophobia during a flight manned by African pilots.
It also shows Ndebele’s director-general, Kwazi Mbanjwa, nattering on in Black Consciousness Zero Percent mode about information-sharing between the provincial department of transport and America’s federal highway administration. The tour de force is a series of scenes beginning with Martin Luther King Jnr’s famous I Have a Dream speech, delivered in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The black and white footage of King gives way to an American civil rights banquet where the MC acknowledges Ndebele’s presence. The audience then suffers through slow-motion footage of Ndebele rising from his seat to soak in the applause, beaming, before sitting down slowly again, pursing his lips and clasping his hands. The filmmaker then cuts, unashamedly, to King lying in his coffin to the strains of We Shall Overcome.
While Ndebele’s office was keeping mum on the cost of this cinematic exercise it is in keeping with the provincial government leader’s taste for self-promotion and self-congratulation at taxpayers’ expense.
Billboards bearing the grinning faces of Ndebele and transport minister Bheki Cele can be found around Pietermaritzburg. During his provincial budget speech last month, journalists and MPs were given leather hold-alls with a writing pad, a pen and a bedtime cure for insomnia: The Collected Speeches of Sbu Ndebele, his 2008 state of the province address and the latest copy of Black Business Quarterly, containing an uncritical cover story about the premier entitled ‘Encore of an aspirational inspirationâ€.
Presumably money for this self-promotion is coming from the R22-million set aside in Ndebele’s budget for ‘communication servicesâ€.
He noted in his budget speech that an independent report found ‘a large improvement in communicating the work of the governmentâ€.