Koko’s arrest shows how a slap on the wrist can grow into a klap

It’s all good and well to be on the winning team. Everybody wants to be. But you need two things: a team that is winning and to be part of it. For a couple of years, those have not been descriptions of the Zuma camp within the ANC.

Ag, sure, there were the hints of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s ridiculous lockdown restrictions and that riot in KZN, but that’s more actions of a dog with its back against the wall than a leading political faction.

Up until now, the most that’s happened is some Gupta arrests in Dubai we haven’t heard much more about since June – and, locally, very little.

The acolytes on this side of the world have largely gotten off with a slap on the wrist and a bad look in the public eye.

Y’know, if you can take millions meant for your people and be morally okay with that while sleeping peacefully at night, I doubt you’d have any qualms about the media labelling you a bad guy. It seems to be a rite of passage into the Zuma loyalty factions to get the chance to claim you’re being oppressed by the media, cry woe-is-me and abuse Twitter to convince yourself you’re not that bad.

That was all easy. You got to keep most of the money, people didn’t like you and you hardly had to wait a week before your comrades initiated the next scandal and everybody forgot about you. Seems like a great low-risk arbitrage opportunity if ever there was one.

The thing with arbitrage low-risk opportunities is that once they become established, more and more people want in… and the more people who get in, the more stories become known. Just ask Bathabile Dlamini about “smallanyana skeletons”.

So what’s exciting about Matshela Koko being arrested in South Africa, and sitting in the docks for something as relatively small as a bail hearing?

Those who thought they were protected can see the armour coming apart. The slap on the wrist can ultimately grow into a klap through the face that not all the botox in the world will be able to hide.

The more the likes of the Kokos are forced to answer the difficult, probing and probably implicating questions, the more their allies are going to try to find ways to protect themselves.

That’s the intriguing thing about being on a winning team: when the team is no longer of value, you still want to be a winner even if you had absolutely no part in making that team a winning one – until the team starts to suck. Then what? Then you do what you can to make it seem like you weren’t the cause of the suck. If the state has a case that is winnable against Koko, I have no doubt that his lawyers are drafting a lovely big list of things they can offer the NPA in exchange for leniency.

I also have no doubt that Koko’s lawyers are not the only lawyers making similar lists. That Zondo commission was cool and all, and the lip service the president recently paid to it was obviously welcome but nobody goes to the movies just to watch the previews. It’s time to get to the feature film, which I believe is a new version of Jaws. That’s the thing about being on a winning team. When the winning stops, what have you got left?

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