Arts and Culture Minister Nathi Mthethwa on Sunday charged that some senior ANC leaders were traitors who have betrayed President Jacob Zuma the same way Judas Iscariot deceived Jesus Christ. Mthethwa said those backstabbing Zuma were driven by money.
He also leapt to the defence of Zuma’s controversial friends the Guptas, saying the family only received crumbs from the economy.
“Judas took the money to betray Jesus. Some of our comrades have been bought. You see this when a comrade is out of control to talk badly about the ANC and its president,” said Mthethwa.
Mthethwa, a close Zuma ally, was addressing an ANC cadres forum in Molweni township, west of Durban. He said while some senior ANC leaders - calling themselves 101 veterans - were busy attacking Zuma, they were missing the bigger picture, which was white monopoly capital.
Mthethwa denied that the state had been captured by the Guptas, and argued that the concept should be traced back to the times of Cecil John Rhodes, whose legacy could be linked to the current white mono- poly capital.
He added that for the SACP leaders to reject the ANC and Zuma’s views on white monopoly capital, they were denying the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s revelation that black people controlled only 3% of the country’s economy.
“So you say people who own 97% do not exist. Our own comrades are saying that. They even sweat saying that,” he said. “People are petty. They are fighting President Zuma, and they are losing (sight of) the bigger picture. They want the bigger part of the economy to continue to be in the hands of white people,” Mthethwa said, adding that the Guptas were sharing only 3% of the economy.
“Why chase a lizard when there are crocodiles? The whole nation is made to focus on 5% and forget about the companies that have been getting big contracts from the government for the past 40 years,” he said.
Mthethwa said that unlike the current crop of SACP leaders, party leaders such as Moses Mabhida and Walter Sisulu worked tirelessly to defend the ANC.
The Gupta family have come under increasing pressure in the wake of leaked emails which showed how they and Zuma’s son Duduzane were interfering in the appointment of senior officials in the government and their business dealings.
Mthethwa’s comments differed from those of another Zuma supporter, Ekurhuleni mayor Mzwandile Masina, who told Zuma at the weekend that the Guptas needed to give them space to work.
SACP spokesperson Alex Mashilo accused Mthethwa of being delusional for thinking that the SACP has not criticised white monopoly capital.
He said the party had initiated the struggle against all forms of state capture. “Nathi Mthethwa must have been sleeping when the SACP was leading campaigns against large sections of monopoly capital.”
He said that if Mthethwa felt the Guptas owned the crumbs of the economy, they were still “better off than the people who own nothing”.
“Nathi Mthethwa must be concerned about our people who were oppressed under apartheid who own nothing in this economy. But the Guptas have become South Africa’s top billionaires. That is not a crumb compared to millions of our people who live in shacks and have nothing,” said Mashilo.
Mthethwa on Sunday announced he had withdrawn advertising in newspapers and other media institutions which were reporting negatively about the ANC, the government and Zuma.
Withdrawing the adverts was part of defending the liberation movement and its leaders, he said.
In his department and other departments, which he did not mention, there was a standing policy that “no one is going to advertise in newspapers which had an agenda to destroy the government”, he said.
“It does not happen in my department. People have an agenda against this transformation.
“It is like you are feeding a crocodile and stand next to it hoping that it won’t attack you because you are kind by feeding it,” said Mthethwa.
The government was spending millions of rand a year on advertising.
“It cannot be. We must take care of this money,” he said.
“We buy the very same newspapers that are against you. A large portion of government spending is on advertising in newspapers and elsewhere,” he said.
Zuma’s opponents would turn to the media whenever they wanted to gain popularity, he said. He called on ANC supporters not to believe everything they read in newspapers whenever bad things had been written against Zuma and the government.
“We should read beyond headlines. Naspers, which owns lots of media in South Africa, was made for Afrikaners,” he said.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was enjoying positive media coverage whenever he went to campaign, but former African Union Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was being reported on negatively, he said.
“They are writing that Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma was only campaigning in KwaZulu-Natal. But the comrade (Dlamini Zuma) went to the Eastern Cape, and visited four regions, but not one single television covered comrade Nkosazana while crisscrossing the Eastern Cape.”
Mthethwa said the media was being used by certain people to further their agenda. “If you do something, but people cannot see you, people would think you are doing nothing,” he said.
Anglogold chairman Sipho Pityana, Save South Africa and a few others would simply call press briefings whenever they wanted attention, he said.
“But where there are lots of people the media does not attend,” he said.
“Today if you want to be starring or be Clint Eastwood, you just call radio or TV to insult the ANC; they would be loved and called a veteran even if they don’t have a Struggle history.”
He rejected ANC veterans’ calls for the party’s National Policy Conference set to take place later this month to be replaced by the special national general council, to discuss challenges facing the party - including Zuma’s fate.
“They say ‘we want special’, but we say ‘you cannot get special congress because there is nothing special with you’, but it is our branches that are special,” said Mthethwa.
“It is not that we cannot respond to the comrades who are always speaking on TV.
“We can expose them, but that’s not how we were taught in the ANC. They, together with those who are leaders of the alliance, are nothing to us,” said Mthethwa.