The sinister agenda by the Mail & Guardian and it’s hired guns won’t succeed

By: Mphumzi Mdekazi

On 12 July the Mail & Guardian published a letter authored by Andile Zulu titled: Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, this is why South Africans question your integrity. This was the writer’s response to Minister Sisulu well-read opinion piece titled: “Hi Mzansi, have we seen justice” published in several print and online media outlets a few months ago.

Minister Sisulu has on countless public platforms stated that she stands by her views expressed in the column. But some including Zulu, have sought to deliberately distort Minister Sisulu’s views for their own self-serving ulterior motives. However, Minister Sisulu welcomes Zulu’s right to freely express himself, as freedom of speech, the precious civil liberty that she and many others fought for, is the bedrock of any well-functioning democracy.

What Minister Sisulu finds highly troubling though, is the sinister agenda being pursued by the Mail & Guardian in refusing her the right to reply to Zulu’s letter. Despite numerous pleas by Minister Sisulu’s office to the Mail & Guardian to grant her the right reply, this request has fallen on deaf ears. The right of reply is a crucial right to defend oneself against public criticism in the same space where it was published. This is a legal right that is also a matter of editorial policy by media committed to informing the public truthfully and objectively.

That the Mail & Guardian saw it fit to deny Minister Sisulu this right can only bring one to the conclusion that this publication is hell-bent on pursuing an agenda against Minister Sisulu aimed at tarnishing her reputation and assassinating her character. I have bad news for the Mail & Guardian: this shameless agenda won’t see the light of the day. This unethical conduct by the Mail & Guardian cannot be left unchallenged and the Minister reserves her right in this regard.

Strangely, Zulu’s letter has received an inordinate amount of room and space as though it represented the collective views of the paper. His identity was also concealed, a fact that may as well suggest that he could be a ghost-writer, or some hired gun. His article is on a song with every other anti-Lindiwe Sisulu article published in similar traditional publications around the country since the year began.

He is one of Mail & Guardian’s young thought leaders; a self-titled Shakas-Coconut on Twitter with a befitting smile. He is a perfect choice to express these views on behalf of M&G. It is no wonder that some black readers responded to his article with SABC journalist, Flo Letoaba’s rhetorical question to John Steenhuisen when he made a blanket statement about what South Africans want; “which South Africans?” But what is lacking in Andile Zulu’s long and arduous detours, sidetracks and uphill narrative is the kernel of his article. Then Minister Sisulu is complicit in Zulu’s judgment.

“The most shocking example of this relationship was when the state, steered by your party, colluded with a mining company to violently suppress a workers’ strike in Augus 2012, he asserts, implicating Sisulu on Marikana” Zulu ‘s long, long list of failures and challenges faced by the ANC from domestic workers’ rights to Free Education and land restoration are all heaped on Sisulu’s shoulders. In as much as I accept collective leadership, these are daunting matters that are continually addressed. Zulu offers us an invented compliment by exaggerating Sisulu’s influence above that of other colleagues.

Personally, as a black man, I am interested in how publications treat black women leaders. The treatment of Mama Winnie by white media globally was eye-opening. I prefer to term traditional media as colonial media since that is how they came into existence in our context. This was evident in how colonial media responded with an exaggerated unified stance against Minister Lindiwe Sisulu’s decolonial letters. The agenda of colonial media is to uphold coloniality in all its forms because it is the foundation on which our democracy stands with its undisturbed racial inequality.

It is within this context that one must understand Zulu’s opinion letters about Minister Sisulu. Zulu also represents two worlds by associating himself with both patriarchy and whiteness. This is the perfect combination of how a black woman is constantly undermined. She is undermined both by black traditional men who reject to be led by a black woman as well as whiteness in all its manifestations.

A black woman leader is thus treated like Sara Baartman where she must be publicly stripped and shamed for no other reason other than being a black woman. This is the treatment of Sisulu by the media since her views on the Judiciary. I earlier wrote that the response to her letter was blown so out of proportion that no one paid attention to the parliament that had just burnt down. We instead watched her being burned by newspapers like Joan of Arch. For what?

By Zulu’s own admission in his first letter, Minister Sisulu is the most revolutionary-morally sound leader among the ANC. Incredibly he decides that “the fiber of your moral character is somewhat irrelevant.” How can one’s revolutionary morality character be irrelevant in an environment that needs revolutionary-moral character?

Zulu insists on the minister’s resignation just like every other reactionary who called for her head over the Hi Mzansi letter while the same people are currently defending corrupt leadership, with money laundering on the rise and glaringly visible to everybody’s eye.  The intent of colonial media is to train both the colonizer and the colonial clerk to subjugate and portray the native as a savage with no capacity to reason. It seeks to convince other colonizers that the native can only be a servant whose position in society must be stripped wherever it manifests itself.

The word Nkosi means Lord but because the colonizer also has that title, a native must have a more diminished title and that is how iNkosi became a chief, never Lord. The attempt of these writers is to chip away even a leader with sound revolutionary-moral character because she is a black woman. But colonials never did love a native who did not allow themselves to be subjugated first. A good black to the colonially minded is a colonized black and a House Negro.

In his first letter against Sisulu, Zulu writes: “Simply defined, power is the capacity to influence and or implement change in society.” How Sisulu has used her capacity to influence and implement change in society can be traced back to her youth activism, the time she served in jail, tortured, exiled, and got beaten by the then colonial establishment, it’s not clear if she was already a “Princess” by then or the label came later from the peacetime revolutionaries and armchair critics.

But in government, Sisulu brought an anti-corruption bill without support even from civil society or from intellectuals, she created the school of government and came up with the housing bank targeting the poor. She fought corruption in the Department of Water and Sanitation where politician’s wives were implicated, particularly in the Eastern Cape, and as expected, she received no support from any law enforcement agencies, let alone from the higher echelons, she was instead reshuffled so that the forensic investigation reports can be sealed in the water sector. The cover-up mission was a success.

Zulu appears to be accepting the abnormality that corruption is legitimate when it’s done by certain individuals in our society. Sisulu provided more than 4 million houses for the poor and had she received cooperation from the courts when she wanted land to build, she could have done more than four million, but the courts strangled and obstructed her for almost ten years, just in pursuit of land to build for the African poor majority.

It was Lindiwe Sisulu who secured the AU Chairmanship for President Cyril Ramaphosa as well as UN-Security Council Chairmanship, something she is yet to be recognized for, let alone the fact that no one knows what gains we made with both those strategic Chairmanships. At the beginning of our democracy, she fought for South Africans to carry the same ID document, something that was heavily resisted by white South Africans of that time who insisted on carrying apartheid documents that symbolize their superiority. She won that battle to those white South African of the time so that today, Andile Zulu can carry the same looking ID as his friends, regardless of their color or creed.

Zulu also wildly chooses to associate Marikana with Minister Sisulu and the ANC when the main culprit, according to the latest findings, for the massacre is known. What Zulu also forgot to associate Minister Sisulu with is Covid 19, Glenchor’s bribery of judges, sealing of CR 17 documents, and the arrest of Vincent Smith as the only success story of the State Capture Commission.

Black women are often used as scapegoats as demonstrated in the deification of Mandela and the demonization of Winnie in the South African story. Just as Zulu heaps all the sins of the ANC on Sisulu’s head, the sins of apartheid were heaped on Madikizela-Mandela’s head. She was expected to apologize at the TRC while many of the perpetrators and apartheid beneficiaries got away with crimes against humanity. No one demands answers from them even now. Opinion letters that suggest any amount of justice to tip the scales toward a fairer society become an unending controversy.

Nobody has interest on establishing the role of Tony Leon’s father for instance in hanging Africans while he was still a judge, the TRC had no interest in interrogating that, yet this is a period in which the ANC lost upstanding leaders like Solomon Mahlangu at the hands of these Judges, who never accounted even today. TRC’s obsession was with Winnie Mandela. Sisulu has her eyes set on having a second TRC, especially an economic TRC, where serious commercial crimes were committed to bankrupt the coffers of the country. Interestingly no current ANC leader is interested in these ongoing illicit financial flows, which even today are still crimpling our economy and delaying a well-deserved development of our country.

Zulu questions Sisulu’s ambitions. How dare a black woman, who has singlehandedly tabled an anti-corruption bill and fought against corruption, have ambitions in a country that pretends to fight against corruption? How dare a woman have ambitions in this country that is yet to see a woman Chief Justice? It is Zulu’s duty to question such motives.

He claims to be an academic, pan-Africanist and a spokesperson of South Africans and these titles engender him to ask this, “It is not the soundness of your arguments, or the righteousness of the causes you purport to support, that most South Africans question.” An argument either has merit or not and how it sounds is inconsequential.

Zulu writes in amorphous terms when he asks confusingly, “It is the integrity of your political ambitions and the alignment of your material interests that deserve intense scrutiny.” So, to raise a hand to be counted amongst those who wish to lead enlist such investigative security as to question the “integrity of your ambition.” His choice of words is both unfortunate and misplaced.

Then there is the questioning of alignment of material interest? Sisulu has struggled and must continue to struggle to restore our people’s vital interests as government. These interests are not personal as they are collective. The ANC exists to further these people’s interests and it is an inevitability to have disagreements about how best to attain them.

After all, the ANC presidency is for rich men who can buy everybody and everything, whose rule is continually marked by strange massacres, a worsening economy, and a legacy of nothing but endless destruction and suicidal hopelessness. The most powerful leaders in the country with the capacity to implement societal change and ANC resolutions have had power over Eskom, SA Post Office, and SAA and collapsed them, Zulu believes it is all because of Sisulu.

As I am writing this article, Cde Jessie Duarte, the only woman in the ANC top 6, has just being buried. She had lamented how the ANC was regressing as it continued to overlook women in prominent positions. There are currently just two women premiers in the country. In all the years that South Africa has existed, there has never been a woman Finance Minister. For the first time on television, we are finally witnessing a relatable face of a black woman economist in Phelisa Nkomo in a country where the poorest are black women.

It is a known fact that during economically challenging periods, a woman is the most effective leader. Those black people who are critical of Sisulu like Zulu ought to practice how to pronounce ‘Chief Justice Mandisa Maya’ if they care at all about saving the soul of this country, at least for the poor. I doubt that Zulu will have a change of heart. He is not angry at the status quo perhaps because, among his peers, Zulu is in fact the elite. Millions of poor young black people could never dream of being afforded the platform he enjoys. His disdain for leaders such as Lindiwe Sisulu is because they do not speak to him since his interests are already being served.

I listened to an interview by a valiant South African, former SAPO CEO, Mark Barnes who regretted resigning when he faced opposition to fighting for a functioning transformed post office that serves all South Africans. He said: “I should have stayed and fought.” The only people who should resign are those who have no vision like we are witnessing today. We are led to poverty, ruins, and perpetual darkness.

Zulu must forget it if he expects the last remaining stalwart leaders from a generation of unacknowledged women to quit without putting up one last fight for the country’s poor, who are largely black women, with all the skills she has picked up since 1994. Had she been a man, no one would be questioning her motives or attempting to diminish her achievements, well not as viciously at least because anyone who fights any manifestation of coloniality, and corruption is an enemy today.

She contributed and earned her political stripes for her to be criticized by some untraceables. Sisulu is the only Minister who is always treated with suspicion and criminality, this is despite her strong political pedigree. This is all because of male insecurity.  When she was reshuffled from Water Affairs, Adv Vusi Pikoli was specially hired to ensure that he delivers Sisulu’s head, together with her senior officials and advisors. Up until today, it is not clear why a reputable advocate would struggle to find any trace of actual corruption by Sisulu and her team until to date.

An interesting one is that the school of Law at UNISA, together with their Vice Chancellor agreed to grant Sisulu an honorary Professorship of Law, and guess what? A senior ANC politician is blocking that process and compelling the university to honour Sisulu after the December conference, not on the agreed September 2022 date. South Africans must connect their dots on what is at play here because with these shenanigans we end up having agents like Andile Zulu, who are mindlessly brave because they learn from their role models how to demonize and criminalize certain ANC leaders.

*Mphumzi Mdekazi, political Advisor to Minister Sisulu. He is also an ANC member from AB Xuma Branch in Boland Region (Western Cape).