The Sunday newspapers had a field day this weekend in uncovering a sex scandal involving one of our more charismatic politicians, Fikile Mbalula.
It was reported that our intrepid minister of sport and recreation has fathered a child after a liaison with a 27-year-old model.
The story was juiced up by the fact that the 40-year-old, married father-of-one has continuously endorsed the ANC Youth League’s one-girlfriend, one-boyfriend campaign.
At first, Mbalula denied the reports, then tried to muzzle the media in the courts before eventually admitting defeat and apologising to the public.
Opposition parties gasped, the public’s collective jaw dropped and his own foes inside the ruling party quietly chuckled.
But, while everyone was frothing over the sordid details of Mbalula’s extra-marital affairs, I was thinking: Why do we care?
When you take your car to be serviced, do you give two hoots whether your mechanic is having an affair behind his partner’s back?
Unless you are some sort of sexual deviant in the mould of a psycho-voyeur, I reckon you’d be more concerned about how they fiddle with your car’s pipes.
So while people are fretting over what Mbalula does with his bat and balls in his spare time, I am more concerned with how he controls South Africa’s sporting balls.
Moreover, I’d pay good money for someone to show me a country that doesn’t have politicians who screw around behind their spouses’ backs.
Bill Clinton, Silvio Berlusconi, Catherine the Great, Dominique Strauss-Khan, JF Kennedy, Vaclav Klaus, Moshe Katsav and Jeremy Thorpe are some of the more well-documented cases of politicos being caught with their trousers round their ankles.
We even seem to have conveniently forgotten about President Jacob Zuma’s many incursions into the realm of sexual scandal in which Mbalula now finds himself.
Just last year Zuma fathered an illegitimate child with Sonono Khoza, the daughter of his friend Irvin — a deed for which he was hauled across the coals.
He eventually apologised but was still challenged to a vote of no confidence in Parliament by opposition parties.
While it might be difficult for some to equate Zuma’s fathering of an umpteenth child out of wedlock with Mbalula’s sexual cavaliering, I’d suggest that an example for behaviour is usually set by those that lead you.
In Mbalula’s defence, since his ascension to the ministry of sport and recreation, he has made all the right noises — and has taken the right action in some cases.
I prefer to judge my politicians based on their actions in Parliament and not in the bedroom.
Accordingly, I would suggest we cut Mbalula some slack and let him get on with the job at hand — I think we can all agree that none of our politicians need any more distractions.