How many outrages can South Africans shrug off?

The time we are passing through as a nation is ominous. I know people say we live in interesting times, but this particular “time” is a scary animal. 

How can one country, in one month, have so many debacles? 

• A former president who now leads a party he doesn’t want to, and is spending time in court trying to remain in the party he once belonged to, goes to Morocco — the force occupying the Saharawi Republic. Our former president stands in front not of the flag of his party, but that of the country he lambasts each day. Why miss the opportunity to market his party internationally? How many pieces of silver did he get for unsaying what he has been saying all these years about the need for the monarchy of Rabat to get out of the Western Sahara? There is talk that he wanted Rabat to finance the establishment “of a privately run college of military intelligence  and combat training” in Pretoria. The college, according to one newspaper, “would serve as a training hub for defensive operations”. Is this to replace the national defence force? 

• And then, in a throwaway line, the minister responsible for intelligence tells the nation there were and still are plans for a coup in South Africa. A real coup d’état? And this we are told in a cavalier, by-the-way fashion? Is it Gen Rudzani Maphwanya and his supposedly ill-equipped SANDF behind this? Or is it the special forces police general from KwaZulu-Natal and his local version of the Seals? Or is it the man now doing crowd funding to run a combat school in Pretoria, of all places? Shouldn’t we be given some details, at least? 

• A cabinet minister who attends a parliamentary oversight meeting, chewing gum nogal, tells MPs to Google for answers. She lies, in broad daylight, about an alleged independent committee that had recommended some interesting people to become chairs of sector education and training authority (Seta) boards. She then tries, when this is proven to be false, to say that independent didn’t really mean independent but rather her own staff who had no interest in chairing the boards. Small wonder she is now an ex-minister. 

• Then a former MEC and premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Nomusa Dube-Ncube, gets appointed by the said minister to chair one of the Seta boards. When this bombed, she was put on the board of the Industrial Development Corporation. Then she was appointed deputy minister in the department that had first appointed her to the Seta board, higher education. It is quite clear that someone wants her in a job at all costs. 

• In the midst of the raging controversy over the Seta boards, the health MEC of Gauteng appoints eight mainly ANC Youth League members to the boards of hospitals in the province. These are people who will make decisions about the running of public hospitals in Gauteng. One of them apparently hasn’t completed matric. How does this square with the National Health Insurance (NHI) Act and the new ethos? 

• Then we have the highly visible ex-convict turned businessman turned politician, whose became famous by eating sushi from the near-naked bodies of young girls, making it so big in Joburg City politics that he becomes an MMC and even acting executive mayor for a few days. As if that is not enough, police find him at a high-profile murder suspect’s house, apparently there engaging in some journalism on the side.  

• And of course there is the general from KZN who unleashed a slew of allegations about malfeasance in the police force,  which claimed the heads of the minister of police and the police’s national deputy commissioner. We have another judicial commission appointed to look into the general’s allegations, while parliament creates an ad hoc committee to do the same. 

Any one of these incidents is enough to cause a serious public upheaval, but we have become immune to the shock of shocking developments. We have normalised these, and no longer question the ANC about whether these are in line with the party’s so-called renewal. 

As the media churns out daily instances of skullduggery, as a nation we note these, shrug and move on. We know we are in trouble if a former president wants to start a private army in broad daylight, but we shrug and move on. We have accepted that the morality of those in places of authority is non-existent. We “have elevated thieves to positions of leadership” and have now accepted that “systematic looting, and low morals [have] become ingrained as the national normality”. 

It's sad, sad, sad.  

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