Thoughts on the prospect of a bonded President: will we be ruled by the favours he owes?

Most politicians are whores. It comes with the territory. As a politician it is virtually impossible to climb the power ladder without selling off pieces of yourself along the way.

This is because in the world of modern politics influence has become a commodity. Influence is the sole currency in those high places where favours are traded amongst the custodians of the various disciplines of modern society’s substance: politicians, industrialists, entrepreneurs, bankers, etc. Ah yes, and many times even trade unionists.

Where these men meet a myriad of tightly knit and ever spreading networks of men of “consequence” are formed and become inseparably intertwined with each other as their different breeds of influence feed off each other during a cross pollination which nurtures the resultant organism through years and years of vested interest driven networking. It all sounds very complicated, but just think of it as mould growing on a stale old loaf of bread in a dark, damp wooden cupboard.

I have been unable as yet to decide whether this is a bad thing altogether, this concurrence of politicians, entrepreneurs, industrialists, unionists and other assorted sorts in the world of power, or whether ordinary men once in a while derive sufficient benefit from it for us to tolerate it. We, the uninitiated, know little about this organism and what we think we know is based on speculation and conspiracy theory mostly. It is known to us really only for its obscurity and for the fact that tabs are kept in this dimly lit, thick carpeted kingdom of wooden clad walls and discreet whispers flavoured by the aroma of exotic cigars and rare imported aperitifs.

We know the fate of ordinary men is written on the tabs these men keep. The quality of our lives, or more often than not the lack of it, is determined by the favours they owe each other. But what if these determinators of our fate are not the paragons of excellence popular opinion so badly wants them to be, super beings with abilities and gifts far above those of mere mortals; what if they turn out to be just ordinary men who got themselves elevated through luck, cunning or sheer circumstance in this age where the bar has so consistently dropped that the scales of excellence has had to be reinvented several times already to accommodate the meagre abilities of prominent dwarfs and untalented hacks in high places?

One tab which tickles me more than any other is that of our prospective new president. What were the terms of the trades he made in the networks that resurrected him from virtual political death to the position in which we find him today: poised to begin his ascend to the throne? This, against seemingly insurmountable odds generated by his own personal choice of lifestyle, lovers and associates not to mention those drawbacks he was not responsible for himself such as that which came with his non-Xhosa ethnicity. One cannot help but wonder...

I wake up often, these nights, in a cold sweat after nightmares in which Zwelinzima Vavi is a senior minister in our Cabinet. And then I realise that I should count my blessings. That Zwelinzima Vavi, immature wannabe politician and loose cannon for whom there should be no place in high stake politics now or ever, is not a problem at all. I realise in these moments when panic threatens to choke me, that I should thank God, and every other deity, sub deity and would be deity that could possibly exist in the entire multiverse between here and infinity, for the apparent fallout between Zuma and his great friends, the Brothers Shaik. Because even in the blessed absence of jailed Shabir and the divine luck of Chippy ducking into hiding from the National Prosecuting Authority, there is still a couple of Shaiks left to collect on that tab. Imagine Mo Shaik as the Minister of Education. Yunis, our new Chief of Police.

I cannot even bear to think of any others like these men who may come out of the woodwork now that payday seems to have arrived. We should all get down on our knees and stay there for the next two years until after the announcement of the new Cabinet in 2009 and the revelation of the rest of the powers that will make up the Zuma administration, when we will see how much of his presidency our prospective new president has sold off, pawned or bonded, even before it was his, to the band of misfits, thugs and thieves he has associated himself with.
Let us pray.