Posts tagged as “African National Congress”

Watergate set the trend. Since then we have locally had Muldergate, Travelgate, Guptagate and now Nkandlagate. There are others, quickly forgotten as new political outrages displace the old more swiftly than one can keep track.

The gate suffix is now so ubiquitous through journalistic overuse as to be meaningless. Especially given what separates the first gate scandal from the most recent.

Watergate, however disastrously misbegotten it turned out to be, was strategically calculated. It was a deliberate act of illegality with the risky intention of sabotaging a Democratic Party machine that Richard M Nixon feared was going to deprive him of a second term as president of the United States.

Nkandlagate, in comparison, is simply just another example of presidential greed and arrogance. It was a tawdry act of self-indulgence that Jacob G Zuma and his sycophantic cronies believed would have zero political consequences.

After all, this is a president who has defied political gravity for a long time. This is a man who won an almost two-thirds majority in his first tilt at the polls, despite a rape trial, followed by charges of racketeering, fraud and corruption that were foiled only by all kinds of behind-the-scenes shenanigans in the prosecution authority and intelligence services.

This is a man who despite a first term that could at best be described as lacklustre, went on to win a second term with a respectable 62% of the vote. How Nixon would have admired such a triumph of the brazen over the righteous.

So it is then not surprising that Zuma shrugs off the Nkandla controversy and the public protector’s finding that taxpayer money was misspent on private luxuries. During the election campaign earlier this year, he dismissed Nkandla as being the concern only of ‘bright people’, not ordinary voters. Apparently Number One is oblivious to the damning imputation of his words against the intelligence of his supporters.