‘I’m not the type to pray except when I fall. I’m only human after all!” These fun Parlotones lyrics have been on my mind since last Sunday when City Press ran a front-page sex-scandal story about the sports minister, Fikile Mbalula. A woman claims he impregnated her and then encouraged her to abort the foetus. The next day the minister told us that he “should have known better.” Given our “ag shame!” culture, many completed his soliloquy for him, adding empathetically: “He’s only human!”
My initial intuition was that we should allow individuals, including politicians, maximum space to live authentically. We each deserve freedom to choose what values we want to adopt for ourselves and live in accordance with. Society should only stop us expressing our individual preferences to prevent harm to others. This means that even actions that seem distasteful, like cheating on my wife, are allowed. It is not the moral entitlement or legal right of the faceless majority to be my moral compass.
In this view, the actions of the minister are, at the very least, within the private sphere and so should not be subject to public evaluation. Furthermore, one might argue that if these cheating ways are an expression of his freely chosen morality, then so be it. Is that not what liberal pluralism is about?
This view of morality is obviously contestable. I do not want to argue for it fully on this occasion. I state it baldly in order to underscore the fact that, ordinarily, I would agree with those defending Mbalula’s entitlement to have his private life left unexamined.
But I don’t think this attitude should apply on this particular occasion. There is no blanket rule about when a private act should be up for public scrutiny. Each case should be decided on its merits. Here is why the Mbalula sex scandal is fair game for public debate.
Mbalula has been preaching the gospel of fidelity. If, his private life, he contradicts his public messaging, then it means that he does not believe his own messaging.
Alternatively, it means that he is weak-willed. Citizens need to know about these shortcomings so that they can accurately evaluate him as someone who has been placed in a position of huge public authority and responsibility.
‘Values and principles
Defenders of Mbalula have responded by simply asserting that we are all hypocrites. We might all be hypocrites but we are not all public officials. This distinction matters. Citizens want ministers who can do their job. But some citizens also want government officials who embody their values and principles.
If the private actions of a politician demonstrate that citizens had been misled about what values they were signing up for when they voted for particular political parties in the hope that certain individuals, like Mbalula, might get into government, then citizens deserve information that will result in a better informed political choice the next time around. Mbalula’s hypocrisy is therefore not politically irrelevant.
It is also interesting just how hypocritical and inconsistent the defenders of Mbalula’s right to privacy are. If we like rather than dislike a politician then we are more likely to empathise with them. It is unlikely that the defenders of Mbalula’s right to privacy are motivated by a wholehearted conviction that the public and private spheres must always be kept apart, with a strong, thick line drawn between them.
Many people who lapped up the content of President Jacob Zuma’s former wife’s suicide note, for example, never cried “privacy!” when his family had to deal with the public engagement of a deeply personal, familial tragedy. And, of course, we were all happy to moralise about him cheating on his wives, and exposing himself to HIV.
We defended Zapiro’s right to media freedom, and thought the curtailment of Zuma’s right to privacy justified. What is the difference for many people between Mbalula and Zuma? Mbalula is a darling. Zuma is an ogre. Citizens, and the media, do not always care for consistency.
In the final analysis, my liberal intuitions remain strong. I would agree that it is more important to know whether Mbalula has the ability to deal with the leadership mess in our cricket and soccer structures. It is less important to know whether only his wife can testify about his stamina off the political stage.
But the opposite of the United States’s obsession with every detail of politicians’ lives is not utter indifference either. What we need to decide is, on a case-by-case basis, what facts about a politician’s private life are politically salient.
In this instance the minister of sport’s public moralising about fidelity, particularly in a time of HIV/Aids, justifies the exposure of a man who does not take his own words seriously.
Zapiro would do well to adorn Mbalula with a showerhead. He could do with a cold one.
Eusebius McKaiser is a political analyst