Why Mkhize has to go over Digital Vibes fiasco

The step-aside resolution that the ruling party has used to try and sanitise its image in the eyes of the electorate ahead of the local government elections has been attacked for being aimed at the president’s opponents only.

The radical economic transformation faction suffered its biggest blow yet when its leader, suspended secretary-general Ace Magashule, stepped aside due to the resolution.

Whether the allegation is true or not is immaterial. What matters is whether the president and his faction believe it is worthy of a response.

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Enter Dr Zweli Mkhize and his Ditital Vibes tender-for-friends R150 million Covid-19 communications scandal.

Letting the health minister go following this embarrassing scandal would not be done through the step-aside resolution because he has not been formally charged by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) for any corruption-related offence as is required by the resolution, but it would go a long way in appeasing the president’s detractors.

Is this a suggestion that the health minister must be sacrificed to appease those who have their knives out for the president and his Thuma Mina faction?

Far from it, but if the president were to give marching orders to one of his most trusted lieutenants, he would have definitely killed two birds with one stone, namely, demonstrated to his opponents that his crusade against corruption is not a purge to strengthen his position and that no one is above rebuke.

A wrong is a wrong, whether committed by the rhetoric-spitting Magashule or the darling-of-the-nation Mkhize.

Truth is, the majority of the country wish the allegations of graft by the health minister were untrue, that the clean, hard-working image he has projected throughout this pandemic is his real him.

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But that is exactly what has led to half of South Africa’s corruption problems today: the very bad guys who defend looting state coffers want to continue looting because they are hiding behind the alleged good guys.

Former social development minister Bathabile Dlamini summed it up best in her now notorious quote in an SABC interview: “All of us in the national executive committee [NEC] have our smalla-nyana skeletons and we don’t want to take out skeletons because all hell will break loose.”

There has never been a more honest and public admission than this to the whole of the ruling party’s NEC being corrupt.

The most telling response to her admission on national television that the ANC is corrupt is that there was no huge outrage from the “innocent” ones.

Most probably because even they knew she was telling the truth. Mkhize was in that NEC.

And his skeletons are tumbling out of the closet five years after Dlamini’s public confession.

Rumours have always been there about the suspended treasurer-general of the ANC, but it would seem the media and the country chose to look the other way.

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There were allegations that during his time as the moneyman of the ruling party, he accepted funding for the party from individuals and entities that were beneficiaries of clearly corrupt tenders, like the Prasa/Swifambo locomotive tender.

Until now, there was never a direct link between the health minister and the corruption he was accused of.

But now his own son is said to have benefitted to the tune of R300 000 from the Digital Vibes scandal. Why must he go?

Mkhize might not be a state capturer and he might never even end up fighting corruption charges in a court of law.

But it is the likes of him that enabled state capturers. Because they were compromised, they could not speak out against the rot.

Sydney Majoko.