Zuma didn’t know the cost of the upgrades, we are told. And that’s supposed to make us feel better? asks Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya.
Pretoria - There is a line much loved by both the leadership and the rank and file of the governing party: the masses cannot be fooled.
I have been uneasy with this line for a long time.
At face value, it seems patently false. There is just too much evidence of the masses being fooled around the world in many different areas of life.
Religious cults, pyramid schemes and popular fascist regimes that led people to their ruin all tell the tale of masses being spectacularly fooled.
White South Africans voted for the racist National Party government in ever-increasing majorities in election after election.
My concern with the line as repeated by the ANC is whether they honestly believe the masses cannot be fooled, or are they merely repeating it because it is part of struggle-era vocabulary – like calling certain systems by names that refer to what a farmer is called in Afrikaans.
I wonder how the ANC leadership reconciles its explanation for how more than R200 million got to be spent on President Jacob Zuma’s Nkandla home with its belief that the masses cannot be fooled.
The long and short of the explanation is that the president was duped like all of us by greedy contractors who inflated the costs of the project.
Now I do not know about you, dear reader, but if I arrived at my house and found people digging trenches around my yard and redecorating my furniture and my dog kennel, I would at the very least ask them why they were doing so.
Being a man of modest means, I would ask them how much what they were doing would cost me.
I do not know how those of immodest means behave in a situation like this.
I know one or two people I could confidently call wealthy who count the cost of everything they do; I suppose that is how they got wealthy.
If the answer I got was, “Someone else will pay and you will be liable for only 5 percent of the cost”, I would surely ask how much in rands and cents that 5 percent amounted to so that I could start budgeting.
Then again, I am a mere journalist and not a head of state.
Perhaps presidents are wealthy enough always to have 5 percent of whatever they might be quoted, even if that happens to be R10m as is the case with the Nkandla upgrade.
The ANC leadership and cluster ministers would have us believe that the president had no idea of what the 5 percent he was liable to pay amounted to.
Again I ask, do they really believe the masses cannot be fooled?
It has been said before (and denied) that the president does not read the things he is supposed to read.
I really hope that in this case he would read the memo explaining why strange men were digging trenches around his yard and kraal and then decided if he approved of everything that was being done in his name.
It is after all his house, his protection, and his cattle that the state said it was concerned about.
Suppose the president was honestly not aware of what the upgrade would cost him because he was busy with the more pressing business of running a country.
If it is the ministers’ story that the president did not know how much it would cost him, then they are not serving their boss well.
They are suggesting that the head of state was indifferent or ignorant about what was going on in his own home, including how much all the work would cost him.
I wonder how characterising the president in the manner that the ministers are implying can arouse in citizens a wave of respect for him.
One has to ask how we, as a nation, are supposed to trust a man who is negligent or indifferent about his own financial household’s priorities with the nation’s.
It is not good enough to say you did not know because you were solving political problems in Central African Republic or the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
If you are not interested in why men are digging trenches in your own yard, how can you care about far more complex issues such as whether to support a UN resolution on bombing Libya?
I have seen, read and heard enough to believe that the masses can be fooled.
I have also realised that even as they are fooled, there comes a time when even they realise that they have been had and when they do, there is no telling how they react to being taken for a ride.
* Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya is executive editor of Pretoria News.
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