"What rough beast...
The Democratic Alliance today asked Public Protector Lawrence Mushwana to investigate whether Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang benefited from the inappropriate influence of President Thabo Mbeki. It has been alleged that in March this year, Mbeki called up surgeons at the Donald Gordon Medical Centre to insist that they approve a liver transplant for Tshabalala-Msimang, DA leader Helen Zille said in a statement.
"If this is true, it would be a disgraceful abuse of his public position."
Therefore, DA spokesman Mike Waters had written to Mushwana to ask him to investigate the allegations about the President’s call. In the letter, Waters said it was also alleged that doctors were instructed to describe Tshabalala-Msimang’s condition as being the result of auto-immune hepatitis rather than its true cause, alcoholism.
"If it is true that such a call was made, then there are several concerns relating to the rights of the public in general and other patients with end-stage liver disease in particular," he wrote.
Firstly, Mbeki would have misused his public position to oblige doctors to make a decision that was not necessarily medically appropriate. Secondly, if other patients on the waiting list at the time were in greater need of an urgent transplant, the President’s intervention might have obliged doctors to prioritise political factors over medical factors, and it was possible a more deserving patient might have lost his or her life as a result.
The Times | Public Protector ‘must probe Mbeki’
I have no faith in the Public Protector's office and nothing obvious will flow of this attempt to tie Thabo ever faster to Manto's fast-fraying apron strings. In 2000, a charge of common assault was laid against our previous Public Protector, Advocate Selby Baqwa, by a woman he 'entertained' late one night in his Durban Hotel Room during the 13th International Ombudsman Conference.
Amid allegations of coercion, the charges were dropped.
Lawrence Mushwana is not Selby Baqwa, but human beings are strange and irrational beings and tend to confuse the office for the office holder even unto succeeding generations.
Depending on your point of view, this need not be a bad thing; post-modernism and relativism have entrenched themselves as the Twenty-first Century way. All the Presidency needs do is dispatch a mealy-mouthed lickspittle to issue a couple of lies, several fatuous statements on the powers of the president, and one or two veiled threats hinting at the possible consequences of impugning the good name of President Thabo Mbeki.
It is common practice and presidential spokespersons are practiced at it. The press will go away and even the indomitable Ms. Zille will retire to her corner. But that will not be the end of it. We live in increasingly twisted times and I have a nose for stories that outlive their supposedly short-lived lifespans.
This one will go down to the wire and decide our future. Things do not look good.
On the rocks...
Coincidentally, good old Neil Watson (aka sa male prostitute) appeared in court late last month to face charges of crimen injuria and theft under his legal name, Juan Uys. I called the lowlife scum out as Watson of crimexposouthafrica and when blogging incognito, warning him that nobody remains anonymous on the Web.
Having linked to most of his posts despite the supposedly sound advice of timid local bloggers wary of hounding queers, I have yet to find myself tarred, feathered, drawn, quartered and run out of town on a donkey. The fact was that I had bigger fish to fry and one of them was Uys.
He gave blogging a bad name.
But back to Thabo being responsible for the death of the patient that did not get Manto's newly pickled liver. Anything is possible in this craven world of ours but only one thing is certain. Mbeki's blind loyalty to the ANC Treasurer's wife will undermine his legacy and scar his presidency as deeply as the Iraqi Holocaust will George W. Bush's tenure at the House of the Great Satan.
Joe Slovo was awarded his leopard skin and Chris Hani his state funeral. They were, as Madiba said of Michael Jackson, Great Sons of Africa. Thabo, however, has cooked his goose and, drunk and belligerent — with other people's possessions spilling from her pockets, she is not a pretty sight.
History will remember Mbeki as a foolish man; short-sighted, insecure, intolerant, self-opinionated, and vain. He will not be remembered as 'a team player' and, today, even fellow occultist and dreamer William Butler Yeats would not return his calls.
Whether or not he is investigated, South Africans of conscience will be haunted by the memory of a possible late-night presidential phone call to Johannesburg's Donald Gordon Medical Centre — a phone call that saved the life of an ungrateful Manto Tshabalala-Msimang but might have cost the life of an unknown South African.
And, in this way, Thabo will be remembered as having denied all of us a shot at the better life we saw in '94.
As has been said elsewhere, the furore surrounding Madlala-Routledge and Tshabala-Msimang says less of our non-existent health care system than it does of our executive president. That many see this debacle as defining Mbeki's long presidency speaks volumes.
Thabo, long criticised for his secrecy, careful politicking and extended trips abroad, has self-destructed. A somewhat diffident, retiring personality predisposed to hiding behind his beloved 'collective', he has divorced himself from South Africa's people to indulge his propensity for paranoia and penny philosophising. His Machiavellian streak has seen many relegated to the frozen wastes of obscurity and his inflexibility now opens him to derision and scorn.
Long tired of men in suits running the country (the experience of centuries has worn us thin), we need a breath of fresh air, a populist in the Madiba, Chavez, Putin or Ahmadinejad mould.
Mandela was perhaps more authoritarian than Mbeki, but he had the common touch and used it to good effect. Antithetically, Mbeki epitomises the modern leader, isolated and insecure, out of touch and frequently incommunicado. His aloofness, expressed through his dapper dress and fondness for the Lake poets, is perhaps unsuited to uniting the roiling, emotive masses of South Africa.
The president, wielding enormous executive power, is also one of our primary symbols and it is as an icon, a representative of all that we might become, that Mbeki has bombed. The alleged phone call, if it was made, will end whatever respect or patience informed South Africans might have held for him. Like Tony Blair, the ultimate Tailor's Dummy, he will shed his presidential apparel to wander off to a hollow and empty retirement, uncertain of his contribution to building a new South Africa — even as it crumbles about him.
