Mboweni’s Ghost-Buster theories are as bad as his tin-fish recipes

By Sipho Singiswa*

Recently the former Reserve Bank Governor and former Finance Minister, Tito Mboweni, made a claim that Ramaphosa will save the country and its citizens from a ghost haunting them when he wrote on Twitter: “There is a ‘spectre’ haunting our country. A ghost. A spook. Who will protect us? I think our president will. And should.”

As I was reading this histrionic claim by Mboweni I thought to myself he cannot be serious and recall being told by an acquaintance, that Mboweni has a habit of seeing ghosts at the most unlikely places, but he never introspects enough to see that he himself is one of the White man’s Zombies who played a key role in the making of the ghost that he claims will rescue South Africa from the ghost. This is about as unpalatable as a chicken stuffed with chunky green-pepper.

This is the same man who likes to indulge himself on social media expanding his tinned food stuff into very badly thought out recipes. Many would say that instead of Mboweni spinning the public a yarn he should rather spend quality time learning how to best choose his food ingredients to improve his cooking abilities.

Contrary to Mboweni’s indulgent postulation about our country being saved by Ramaphosa – an alleged political fraudster and money launderer it is he who is the primary ghost that has been haunting the Native African people in this land. Add to this ghost collective Mboweni and the toxic inner circle of the ANC’s boys club. Indeed, Mboweni is one of the White Neoliberal inspired Zombies/spectres who assisted Ramaphosa to become the vampire that has been oppressing and draining the life blood of the Native South African people. This is most obviously seen in Ramaphosa’s role in the August 2012 Marikana massacre of 34 LONMIN mineworkers.

In this grotesque club the ghoulish members externalise the spooky stuff onto the oppressed instead of recognising that they have become the European-inspired ghosts of the ghosts of colonialism and apartheid, so to speak. It is they who have become the monsters that wreak carnage onto the land by continuing and amping-up the dispossession project.

A case in point is that Mboweni made absolutely no effort to remedy the grand scale corruption activities that Ramaphosa had allegedly embarked on, including the MTN, GLENCORE/SHANDUKA GROUP, LONMIN tax evasion and cross-border MONEY LAUNDERING activities in African countries. And this despite him being a member of the ANC’s National Executive and National Working Committees, as well as Chairperson of the National Executive Committee’s Economic Transformation Committee, which coordinated the development of ANC economic policies.

During this same period the White corporate bosses and the Stellenbosch cabal were at pains to court Mboweni to support their Neo-liberal economic narrative. It is no surprise that they identified his ego and narcissism as his weaknesses to be exploited to this end. Due to these weaknesses and his membership of the ANC Boys Club, Mboweni turned a blind eye to Ramaphosa’s clandestine activities as a compromised senior member of the ANC and the government. Mboweni’s own skeletons in the closet also ensured his complicity lest they destroy his political reputation.

Like Ramaphosa, Trevor Manuel and Pravin Gordhan, all members of the ghost club and all text-book revolutionaries and stooges of the neo-colonial liberal white corporate bosses, Tito Mboweni became a member of the white corporate boys club. This in return for assisting white corporate South Africa to re-configure the ANC’s pre 1994 policy-decisions about the economy, land restitution, equal access to quality primary health care, housing and compulsory quality education.

Needless to say, as the Stellenbosch cabal did with the likes of Manuel and Gordhan, they nourished, massaged and exploited Mboweni’s ego and narcissism to achieve this. He was offered membership and minority shares, and was appointed to a few senior positions in white corporate companies such as AngloGold Ashanti, the World Bank, the Joint World Bank-IMF Development Committee and the Goldman Sachs International. And, of course, after his assimilation and indoctrination into the Stellenbosch neoliberal culture he chose to turn a blind eye to Ramaphosa’s criminal transgressions.

In addition to the senior positions he held in the ANC, as well as a former Minister of Labour, Governor of the Reserve Bank and Minister of Finance in the Ramaphosa-led administration, Mboweni must have known all these years that Ramaphosa was acting in violation of the ANC’s economic development and transformation policies, as well as the SARS regulations and forex laws.

That Mboweni calls on Ramaphosa to save us from the ghost haunting this country is as ludicrous as a beef stew with too many carrots in the pot.

Even Thabo Mbeki was forced to concede that as the President, Ramaphosa basically has no viable plan to consolidate the ANC or save the country. And this after initially making the mistake of announcing his support for the Ramaphosa-led administration in an obvious effort to make the necessary intervention to try and rescue whatever was and is still left of the ANC. It seems now he has woken up and smelled the burnt-roast-chicken from Mboweni’s kitchen and realised that South African needs to be rescued from the ominous trajectory of destruction orchestrated by the White-corporate-funded-Ramaphosa-cabal.

Although he was at pains to avoid mentioning Ramaphosa’s alleged money laundering; tax evasion and the buying of votes, Mbeki further pointed out that Ramaphosa deceived the country when he promised to present a national socioeconomic plan that addresses the dire hardship being experienced by millions of economically challenged South Africans. It seems Ramaphosa has no intention of ever dealing with the matters of inequality, increasing poverty levels, unemployment, sky-rocketing food and fuel prices, high interest rates, as well as poor access to quality housing, education and primary health care for the majority Native South African people.

The question remains how have we, as the Native South Africans, allowed all this to happen? How did we get so hoodwinked and so blindsided that we allowed the shady political characters, who would have never passed the ANC’s Eye of The Needle test, to infiltrate the movement’s leadership structures and divert the ANC from developing into a fully fledge people’s government – by the people capable of sincerely addressing issues of equality, justice and peace in a meaningful way?

As young Native African students in the 70’s we rejected racist apartheid laws such as the Job Reservation and Group Areas’ Act, Homeland or Bantustan system – the objective of which was to confine the natural movement of all Native African people to barren lands that were nothing more than cheap labour reserve camps. In our coming-of-age we were aware enough to appreciate the pain of hardship reflected in the eyes of the generations before us as a result of being violently dispossessed of land by White settlers who subjugated and reduced them to simple shells of who they were before the White man’s insatiable selfish avarice, racist laws and brutality were imposed on the Native African people in the country of their natural birth right.

Mbeki once stated that:- “With all its policies and programmes that emanate from the National Democratic Revolution, (the) ANC will never lose governance of this country to the opposition. What will happen is that the ANC will surrender this country to the opposition. This period will be characterised by greed, trampling on the will of the people, when the ANC does not listen to the masses, the corrupt component within the ANC is in charge and their only desire is to accumulate wealth through corrupt means to enrich themselves, friends and families.”

This seems to be a prophecy if, as many speculate, Ramaphosa’s main trajectory is to destroy the ANC from within.

Unfortunately, the inhumane neo-colonial liberal economic agenda that Ramaphosa and his former Finance Minister put in place, has brought no equality and relief from daily economic hardship to the majority South Africans. Instead it was a robust drive for more austerity measures, privatisation of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), escalating fuel and food price hikes, etc.

By Ramaphosa’s own admission at the KZN ANC Provincial conference, the ANC and its Tripartite Alliance structures have between embroiled in divisions, controversy after controversy and corruption since he became its president. With all that said how does Mboweni then still expect the Native South African majority to believe that Ramaphosa will save them from the ghost haunting them when Ramaphosa is exactly the ghost that has spooked South Africans since 1977 when he got recruited into the Urban Foundation Board established to oppose the ANC’s socioeconomic transformation agenda.

In his ‘Spook Haunting SA & Ramaphosa To The Rescue’ theory, Mboweni raves and rants about the Native African people’s land invasions in his eagerness to convey a cryptic message designed to place blame where it is not due. His spookery theory reads like a spoof comic detective book with a main character that speaks from both sides of the mouth. He dismally fails to make any linkage to the ANC’s 54th National Conference Resolutions On Land Restitution, nor the associated loopholes in the constitution that have prevented the general implementation of a meaningful socioeconomic transformation and land redistribution.

Ramaphosa is the same ghost that pleaded ANC poverty while secretly stock piling undeclared billions of US dollars in various private properties while he hounded and haunted ANC members and former personnel at Luthuli House out of office by forcing them into early retirement or to seek alternative employment. His leadership has ensured and overseen the dysfunctionality of the ANC Secretary-General, agitation to disband the MK veteran structures and the ANC Women’s League. All while hiding billions of undeclared US dollars at his private properties.

This may explain the speculation surrounding Mboweni’s unexplained and hasty resignation as Ramaphosa’s Financial Minister, when he got wind of the undeclared millions of dollars stashed at Phala Phala and the subsequently unreported theft thereof. Could it be that he became very nervous, as Ramaphosa’s finance Minister, and decided to run away as fast as possible to find consolation in the private sector. Instead of taking remedial action to stop the rot, Mboweni, as mentioned earlier, joined the likes of Trevor Manuel whose loyalty to the ANC was swapped for the exclusive membership of the likes of Goldman Sachs International and the Rothschild Foundation.

Mboweni is clearly spinning South Africans a yarn about Ramaphosa, who like him, has connived with White corporate bosses to subvert the ANC’s loyalty to the people by prioritising profits before the people. To try and make South Africans believe that Ramaphosa will rescue them from the spook that is the spook is like Mboweni trying to sell mampara worm as spaghetti to the Italians.

*Sipho Singiswa is an ex-Robben Island political prisoner and a well-known documentary filmmaker and political commentator. He is a founder of Media for Justice and Head of media and international programming for Robben Island Ex Political Prisoner Human Rights Programme.