I can still more or less quote one of my best tweets. It was from a friend in response to my announcement that Mbeki-ite and ANC policy guru Joel Netshitenzhe had ‘resigned†(read: pushed).
‘Joel resigned?†asked @Singe, distraught like many others at the unexpected purge of a talented individual. ‘But he was my favourite — I had his collector card and everything!â€
I could list a few other popular cards in the collection: Trevor Manuel for the middle class, Jeremy Cronin for the intellectual left and Julius Malema for the reactionary youth. Everyone has their favourite in a country where the political has always been rather personal and heroes are increasingly few and far between.
I must admit new minister on the scene, public work’s Geoff Doidge, rather grew on me. He hit the ground running upon his appointment in Kgalema Motlanthe’s interim Cabinet last year, and earned a reputation for being hard-working, responsive to the public and dedicated to clean governance. My respect grew into full-blown admiration at his lonely decision to use the ministerial car left behind by his predecessor, in a Cabinet where splashing out on fancy new BMWs has become de rigueur.
I was too busy being grateful for small blessings to remember his controversial squashing of the arms deal investigation in 2001, when he took over from renegade ANC member Andrew Feinstein as chair of Parliament’s study group on public accounts. In political years, it seemed like another lifetime anyway.
So when I first heard that Doidge was burning up director generals (DGs) faster than you could say ‘irregular tendering†in his quest to employ a law firm he had engaged personally before, my neck did this funny thing. It tried to make me look the other way. The facts were simple. He had been through three acting director general for refusing to give a R45-million contract to Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr without putting out a tender. And he was bent on engaging the forensic lawyers despite the minister not having the legal mandate to do so.
Doidge of course has his reasons, and I really want to believe his defence that he is rooting out corruption in his department. He says he is deviating from Treasury regulations because there was ”an attempt to block an investigation into the procurement procedures”. Presumably the three DGs were part of this attempt.
It may well be valid. The department was given a qualified audit by the auditor general this year and Doidge responded admirably: announcing a range of measures, independent audits and processes to clear up any financial mismanagement.
But his unconventional methods and flouting of regulations demand that as a citizen I put my critical cap back on. Indeed, I should never have taken it off. But we all slip up don’t we? We’re so fatigued by the constant reports of the latest government leader tainted with corruption that we’re quick to deify those who seem above it all. Manuel, for example, has long been placed on a pedestal of the nervous middle class’s own making. No wonder then the dismay that met his arrogance and indiscretion over a flashy car purchase. We wanted him to be indefinitely good and pure. We wanted him to never make a mistake.
But we do ourselves a disservice in our premature hero-worship. Especially when, faced with a villain, we’re desperate for a hero. Cope’s youth leader Anele Mda was hailed as the answer to Julius Malema, and Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke was vaunted by media and opposition parties alike as everything reviled Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe was not: ethical, unbiased and dedicated to the rule of law.
But Mda soon proved as unruly as Malema — if not more so, and an explosive Mail & Guardian report on Moseneke revealed how the revered judge has a number of commercial links in conflict with his role.
In my first column I defended Jonathan Jansen’s decision to readmit the Reitz Four to the University of the Free State, saying then: ‘What we demonise we fail to learn fromâ€. The counter argument is true, too. Those we uncritically praise, we fail to hold to account. And while I sincerely hope Doidge will turn out to be the hero we need him to be, I’m not erecting any pedestals just yet.