What’s really keeping Nene up at night?

I must say I was surprised earlier this year when Nhlanhla Nene was reappointed as the finance minister.

I was taken aback because I’d been told more than a year earlier about the Mozambique refinery deal that involves Nene’s son and which was extensively reported on this Friday in the Mail & Guardian.

The person who had told me about that deal mentioned it to me as the reason Nene was being so quiet in the wake of his disastrous axing in 2015.

“Why do we never hear from Nene about Zuma?” my friend asked at the time. “Zuma knows all about that Mozambique deal, and that’s why Nene is being so well behaved.”

Well, I thought. That’s interesting.

Nene had indeed gone very quietly, and then joined the private sector, after that infamous cabinet reshuffle of 9 December 2015.

It took Nene some time to give his first public interview about it on eNCA, and he was cagey even then. Others in the ANC were being far more open about their dislike of Zuma, including another finance minister who’d joined the public sector, Trevor Manuel. But not Nene. Nene was remaining well behaved, even though he presumably had nothing to lose any more in taking the nation into his confidence about the truth.

He would have done the nation a great service, one would have thought, in lifting the lid on the nuclear deal a lot earlier. Nene only finally opened up to the state capture inquiry last week on his view that Zuma had booted him over his reluctance to sign off on that deal with Russia.

Following his revelations under oath last week, we now know Nene had been lying about a lot of things in that eNCA interview.

The current calls by the EFF and others opposed to Nene are based, it appears, primarily on the fact that Nene claimed he’d only bumped into the Guptas by coincidence from time to time and had never had any formal meetings with them. But last week he admitted to at least seven Gupta meetings, including at the family’s Saxonwold fortress and offices.

Some red herring in your Gupta curry?

What’s been surprising to me was how quick Nene was to offer to relinquish his position. It’s been confirmed he asked President Cyril Ramaphosa to relieve him of his duties over the weekend, and they’ve been “engaging” with each other about it. Ramaphosa will make an announcement about it soon.

If Nene wants to go, though, why not just go? No one can force anyone in this country to keep doing a job they don’t want to do – unless they’re slaves, which is illegal, or contracted footballers, who no one feels sorry for. Nene could just quit.

But it seems he would prefer to have the hammer blow come from Ramaphosa himself. Weird, right?

My friend who told me about that bad investment by the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) involving Nene’s son also mentioned at the time that, in his opinion, Nene may not have done anything wrong, but there were serious question marks around what his son had done. All the same, Nene wouldn’t want any harm to come to his son, and so he went quietly.

That same friend told me today, though, that PIC boss Dan Matjila may be willing to talk about how he was allegedly placed under pressure from the very top to ensure that the deal – which has turned out to be a poor investment of public funds – went through.

All of this leads me to wonder if Nene may only be too happy for South Africa to think that what he’s most concerned about is his “shame” at having had previously undeclared meetings with the Guptas.

That may be a red herring. Nene has turned this whole thing into far more of a drama than it needed to be. He just needed to say he’d previously never declared his meetings with the Guptas, but has done so now, and sorry for the delay. If he didn’t agree to doing anything dodgy for the Guptas (as he insists), then that should have been the end of it.

His self-flagellating apology just makes everything about those meetings seem needlessly suspicious and makes it more difficult for Ramaphosa to keep him at the helm of arguably the most important ministerial position in our country.

But perhaps that’s how Nene would like it to play out. Maybe it suits him to be fired, ostensibly, over his Gupta trysts. That way, we won’t end up asking too many questions about what was really going on in that PIC deal, and perhaps other PIC deals.

Nene can even claim a little bit of martyr status if he gets fired over the Gupta drama. It’s possibly even been something of a convenient coincidence for him that the PIC story made headlines on the same day everyone was freaking out about his having had tea with Atul.

Nene told the state capture commission last week he was comfortable he’d done nothing wrong in relation to the refinery deal. Hopefully that’s true.

That’s why I said at the start of this piece I was surprised when Nene accepted a return to the finance minister job from Ramaphosa. It made me think: “Oh, I guess that stuff about his son and the refinery wasn’t true. He must be clean.”

But right now, it doesn’t quite feel that way any more.

Citizen digital editor Charles Cilliers

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