HOGARTH | When elections are child’s play

Gone are the days when election season merely meant politicians kissing babies, shaking hands with strangers and — in the ANC’s case — even doing the laundry for random households.

The stakes are so high these days that the parties now spy on each other. The DA last Sunday sent two agents to infiltrate an ANC rally, reminding Hogarth of the way the Security Branch kept tabs on the unions and others. One of the DA agents wore an ANC T-shirt to help him fit in with the crowd.

Hogarth wonders about the wisdom of this. Why didn’t the party just watch the whole affair on YouTube?

However, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula’s reaction to the saga may have made the whole thing worthwhile. After claiming that the DA “espionage team” had hoped to expose low attendance at the ANC rally, he proclaimed before the TV cameras that the venue had been packed full. He then pulled both his ears, made funny faces and danced while shouting “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” like a kindergarten kid who has snatched a favourite toy from a classmate.

Mbaks, after all, used to be president of the ANC kindergarten.

Try the Thabo Bester trick?

Speaking of spies, the country’s self-proclaimed top spy and political fixer Brown Mogotsi just can’t stay out of the headlines. He has been in and out of the courts recently trying to be released on bail. But after this legal route was blocked — prosecutors said his residential address could not be verified, and that they had video footage showing how he staged a fake attack on himself — Mogotsi apparently came up with an escape plan involving a cunning disguise.

But like many of his other plans, this one too was botched. For a man who sold himself to politicians and shadowy “businessmen” as a fixer, agent Mogotsi doesn’t seem able to fix any of his growing mountain of problems with the law.

Hitting a cat’s raw nerve

Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala has been accused of so many types of serious crime over the past year that you would think an additional one would make no difference to him.

But it seems he was deeply hurt this week when justice Mbuyiseli Madlanga suggested, hypothetically, that cash-in-transit (CIT) heists might also be in his portfolio.

Matlala is already being grilled at the commission about alleged corruption and criminal association with top cops, at least two cabinet ministers and various high-ranking municipal bureaucrats. A taxi boss this week also claimed before the commission that Matlala was involved in the illicit drugs trade.

And outside the commission, Matlala has been a regular in the criminal courts, where he faces two separate cases of attempted murder and tender fraud.

He has been extremely cool about all these allegations, both in front of the commission and the criminal courts.

But when Madlanga tried to illustrate a legal point by inventing the theoretical CIT heist in which Matlala played a role, our man was not impressed.

“Thanks, chairperson, but the heist was a very bad example,” he complained.

Hogarth, as the young ones say on TikTok, was today years old when he learnt that even alleged crime bosses have their standards to uphold.

Please launder this cash

Also appearing at the commission this week was feared taxi boss Joe “Ferrari” Sibanyoni. The Mpumalanga minibus tycoon appears to think his best bet was to present himself as a God-fearing churchgoer who has never harmed a fly and survived two attempted assassinations only thanks to the power of prayer.

Hogarth, however, did find his testimony useful in understanding how the taxi economy works. At one stage, Sibanyoni took the commissioners through the inner workings of “bucket money”, which he says is sometimes collected to pay hitmen. But it was the “socks money” that Hogarth found more fascinating. According to Sibanyoni, if a taxi owner gives a driver a R1,000 daily revenue target, and the driver comes back with R800, the owner has to search the driver.

“As you search him, you will find the other money inside the socks. Hence the socks money…” Sibanyoni told the commission.