Phala Phala cover-up was a handsome mask that lacked brains
· Citizen
In Aesop’s famed fable of the Fox and the Mask, the fox finds himself in a theatre and comes across a skilfully crafted mask.
The mask was used by actors during their performance and the fox had no idea this was the case. He looks at the mask and notices that it is hollow inside and famously remarks: “What a handsome face, but what a pity it has no brains.”
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When the Phala Phala scandal first broke, whoever discovered it thought it best to cover it up. And they nearly succeeded because for almost two years it did not reach the public domain, until Arthur Fraser, a senior official in the now-defunct National Intelligence Agency, blew the scandal wide open.
Covering it up with a handsome mask made it seem better, but did not get rid of the problem. The scandal now seems worse for President Cyril Ramaphosa than it probably would have been had the right and legal procedures been followed at the very beginning.
When Chief Justice Mandisa Maya handed down the ruling on the EFF application to the Constitutional Court on Friday, some 504 days after the EFF had taken the case to the court, she had to first apologise to the applicants and the country for this uncharacteristic delay in handing down the judgment.
Murmurs could be heard in parliamentary corridors that suggested the delay was probably because the findings would be damaging for Ramaphosa. Such cannot be proven but those rumours were damaging to the credibility of the highest court in the land.
But the focus is not on that possible damage right now, it is on the damage to the president’s continued tenure. The long and short of Maya’s announcement is that parliament erred in choosing to use a vote to suppress the ruling of the committee that Justice Sandile Ngcobo had headed.
The committee had ruled that the Phala Phala matter should be refereed to an impeachment committee.
Again, if the ANC had not faced the route of a cover-up, using its parliamentary majority to suppress the Ngcobo report, there was a real possibility that a properly instituted parliamentary committee could have reached the conclusion that the impeachment process was not necessary and the matter would have been closed.
The impeachment committee that the Constitutional Court has mandated parliament to instate now will have the undue burden imposed on it by the long delay which was the result of the initial cover-ups.
Committee members may feel they have an obligation to the country to prove that they are not part of some sinister cover-up to let the president off easily. So, there is a very real possibility that an impeachment process which was not going to happen is now going to happen.
That is what covering up rot does. It makes the wound fester and the damage worse.
Ramaphosa has always been a marked man. His political adversaries have been trying to get him removed from the day he assumed office.
Their motives might range from “you sidelined us from the ANC, you were part of its disciplinary committee that expelled us, you are the reason Marikana happened, you interrupted our looting of state resources by availing yourself to replace a president who allowed us to loot freely…”
Whatever possible reason they had for him to not be president, he was always a marked man and that he survived thus far is credit to his political acumen.
But with the Phala Phala cover-up, his enemies have almost been handed his head on a platter. The cover-up mask was handsome but it lacked brains.