A tragedy of ‘wasted years’

“Chair, if I had a choice I would wake up the next day being a Mrs White or Mrs Smit or Mrs Van der Merwe because that name would give me credibility in my own country.”

Former SA Airways (SAA) board chairperson Dudu Myeni is not the first person to try and avoid being accountable for her role in state capture by invoking her blackness. It is the chosen defence of many. What the architects of that mode of defence fail to appreciate is that the state money that Myeni and others are alleged to have siphoned off for personal use belonged to all South Africans, most of whom are black.

South Africans demand answers from her not because of her blackness, but because of the money siphoned off from state funds. This past week, the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture testimony exposed the tragic waste of human capital that the looting during the nine “wasted years” resulted in.

The state capture project had one theme that ran through all the institutions that it targeted: enforcers who made sure that boards of those institutions were packed with “bendable” individuals and, most importantly, the lucrative contracts and tenders were delivered to their “right” people.

The tragedy of it all is that these enforcers are talented and educated people who now have to play dumb at the commission to try and save their skins. Former SAA board member and chair of SAA Technical Yakhe Kwinana is a qualified chartered accountant who today is obfuscating and giving bewildering answers at the commission, including that English might have been the reason she was misunderstood.

Playing dumb deliberately doesn’t look good on an intelligent and educated person. It is, in fact, tragic to witness, especially in the case of someone like Kwinana who, given her qualifications, could have contributed positively to South Africa’s cause.

The other tragic scene that starred Myeni at the commission was not only tragic in the sense of her talents being wasted by being captured, but by the arrogance that she had to display in order to justify the bad choices and decisions she made in performing her duties at the Mhlathuze Water Board and, later, as chairperson of the SAA board.

When her unfortunate tact of claiming to being persecuted because she is a black woman did not work, she resorted to openly disrespecting the work of the commission by naming a protected witness. A warning by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo that she was going against the legislations that put the commission in place did not deter her from naming the witness yet again.

The impunity with which she went against the warning from Zondo is clearly a result of the entitlement which makes her believe that being “black in her own country” entitles her to some immunity from prosecution. It is the kind of behaviour that requires the judge to throw the book at her, not only for her own sake, but for the sake of this commission and future commissions which seek to uncover the truth behind the abuse of state funds.

It is worth remembering that even though Myeni and Kwinana might be trying very hard to cast themselves as victims of a witch-hunt by an opposing faction of the ruling party, or one that does not want to see black women succeed, the real victims were all those other people that they got rid of in order to fulfil the aims of their state capture counterparts.

The real victim is the whistleblower Myeni named publicly. For that, she must be punished.

Sydney Majoko.

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