HOGARTH | The SG doth protest too much, methinks

Hogarth hears ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula and party chief whip Mdumiseni Ntuli have a long history. Apparently when Mbaks held the same position at the ANC Youth League, Ntuli worked as a staffer for the ANC kindergarten.

It must irritate Mbaks, therefore, that whenever Ntuli opens his mouth to speak, some ANC supporters hail him as “the secretary-general we never had”. This, of course, is a reference to the 2022 ANC national conference, which was expected to usher Ntuli in as secretary-general — only for him to lose out to Mr Razzmatazz.

So when this newspaper last week revealed that the two were fighting over who would represent the party on parliament’s impeachment committee, set up to consider the Phala Phala Buffalo Christmas sale that may or may not have ever happened, Mbalula deemed it necessary to set the record straight.

Dressed in a power suit at an ANC media conference this week, Mbalula admonished Sunday Times journalists for failing to take his version of the story as gospel.

“I’m the secretary-general of the ANC, I am the boss here… When you talk about Luthuli House, the face of it is me… I’m the boss here, Luthuli House, me. I am the boss. This is why I am in a tie, you can see, this is the boss… How can I be defied by a chief whip? Chief whip is employed, not by me, but by me in many ways. He accounts to me,” Mbaks said.

To which Hogarth says, if you have to remind people that you are the boss, you have already lost the boardroom (or in this case, the caucus).

Whipping away their cash

Still on chief whips, Mmabatho Mokoena-Zondi, who had that post in the main opposition MK Party, is, as one scribe put it, “doing a [Sisisi] Tolashe” on her party’s parliamentary staff. Mokoena-Zondi was arrested for fraud and appeared in court this week amid allegations that she defrauded four MK Party staff of more than R233,000 by deducting up to 60% of their monthly salaries on the pretext that the money was was needed for party boss Jacob Zuma’s legal costs.

The Nkandla Crooner has not commented, but Hogarth finds it curious that after the aggrieved staffers reported the matter to the party, Mokoena-Zondi faced no sanction — but was promoted to the chief whip job.

Make him walk the plank

Orlando Pirates finally won the local soccer championship after years of being bridesmaids to Mamelodi Sundowns. As expected, a couple of politicians used every public opportunity to associate themselves with this short-term Pirates success. One MP, Rise Mzansi’s Makashule Gana, even arrived in the House dressed in a designer Buccaneers sweater. When his turn came to deliver his party’s speech on the higher education department’s budget, he seemed more interested in talking about Pirates.

Hogarth moves that, in the interests of love and peace, parliament makes it a rule that MPs are not allowed to show up in their soccer tribe’s colours — just as they are barred from wearing their party’s regalia.

At least they don’t back Man Utd

But things are even worse in Kenya. Hogarth hears that MPs in Nairobi brought their parliament to a standstill as they traded football banter after Arsenal won the English premiership. Even President William Ruto forgot for a moment his new-found bromance with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron as he expressed his joy at the North Londoners’ victory.

The president and his MPs all seem to have forgotten the message of one of their country’s most famous sons, the late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, author of Decolonising the Mind.

Left behind by history

Solly Mapaila, the SACP boss who is famous for skipping an important ANC policy meeting to go plant vegetables at a rural village in the Northern Cape, finally hosted his long-awaited “conference of the left” this weekend.

But the proceedings seemed to indicate that the socialist revolution is as much of a distant mirage as ever. Rather than shaking monopoly capital and its collaborators to the foundations, the meeting — as one former leftist put it — resembled a reunion of the “alliance of the wounded” that gave South Africa Jacob Zuma as ANC president in 2007.

Notable absentees were Zwelinzima Vavi, Blade Nzimande and Mbaks — who seems to like the ANC’s new GNU friends too much to be seen among leftists anymore. All the others were there: Julius Malema, Mapaila himself, Ace Magashule and the man who is reputed to have been among the first to sell his socialist soul for a discounted Mercedes-Benz SUV — Tony Yengeni.

Hogarth hears that political analyst Ebrahim Fakir termed the whole show “the conference of the leftovers”. Apt.