1 December 2019
How does poster boy for difficult conversation lose the stomach for Mkhari?
So President Cyril Ramaphosa accepted an invitation to a conversation with Power FM chairman Given Mkhari, then withdrew at the last minute. Has something meaningful been achieved through this snub?
This is a great pity. Ramaphosa is supposed to be our poster boy of engagement and deep, uncomfortable conversations. After all, he and Mandela sat down with those who killed the best among us – freedom fighters – and negotiated a difficult transition to democracy.
When verkrampte racists set off bombs in our country, when Sabelo Phama was killed, when that venerated communist Chris Hani was mowed down, Ramaphosa was in the thick of things, helping the nation traverse uncharted waters through discourse. He led very uncomfortable but necessary conversations in this, our troubled land.
This week, though, Ramaphosa took a strange decision not to discuss – but to shun Mkhari and his wife Pele. The background is that “emotions ran high” sometime last year for this power couple and they both ended up opening cases of assault against each other. They eventually calmed down and withdrew the cases – but not after the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) investigated whether it wished to continue with the cases. In the end, the NPA agreed with them and the cases were withdrawn.
Legally, we don’t have the facts about whether or not there was abuse and or violence. Logically, we wonder why they would open assault cases when there was no assault in the first place. Technically, there isn’t much that all of us, including the president, can do about the Mkhari poser. In the absence of a case, what remains is rumour and innuendo.
And we all accept that Pele Mkhari is not a village girl who is uneducated and unaware of her rights. In the tabloids, we say she wears a big panty (meaning she is a big girl) and knows exactly where to go if she needs help. And all of us will and must be ready to support her as and when she communicates her need for help.
Until then, how must society relate to her and her man who present a united front before cameras and the nation? Should we force our support on her, and isolate her man, and believe that what we are doing is in her interest – even when she protests to the contrary?
She asks a pertinent question to the NGOs that forced Ramaphosa to withdraw from the Chairman’s Conversation – where have they been in the last year? Why is their support of her linked only to the Chairman’s Conversation? Beneath the question is another set of questions: is this purported support genuine? Or is it not a naked attempt to embarrass the family, and Given more specifically? To me, this is quite plain.
The issue of gender-based violence is a very serious matter. Femicide is not something to be petty and playful about. For many of us with girl children, it is doubly frightening.
If Ramaphosa can sit down with racist killers of our people, the very anti-democratic sorts, what stops him from looking Given Mkhari in the eye and starting a difficult conversation with him about the alleged abuse? Is it his view that it’s best the conversation about the abuse is not had and Mkhari is avoided like the plague? If that is so, why did he accept the invitation in the first place? Surely, he didn’t just find out about the Mkharis’ drama this week.
Further, if our negotiator-president does not have two hours for Mkhari-initiated conversation, even when Mkhari says he will step aside and have someone else mediate the conversation, who should? The implication of Ramaphosa’s rejection of Mkhari seems to be that he does not want to associate him, on the basis of a case that Pele does not want to pursue.
Let me be clear: if Given Mkhari is guilty of assaulting his wife, he deserves condemnation and the harshest punishment the law allows. But there is no live case being investigated against him. He is not a suspect.
Yet the president has a lot of time for tigers (hello, Minister Mantashe) and all sorts of shady characters in his cabinet and his ANC national executive committee. Further, we published screen shots of Lerato Habiba Makgatho saying she fears Finance Minister Tito Mboweni. What has Ramaphosa done? Has he invited Habiba in to check if she has been abused? Is he waiting for NGOs before he can act on her fears? Balderdash!
This newspaper has also published (as have other media) details about senior ANC leaders, some of whom are under investigation for serious crimes. Former intelligence minister Bongani Bongo was arrested for corruption and bribery – and there’s no word from the president.
The point is there are cases against some leaders – not proven yet, but under investigation. With Mkhari, there is nothing. Just suspicion. In the same way there is suspicion of abuse against Ramaphosa given allegations of abuse involving Hope Ramaphosa that were published by The Sunday Independent ahead of Ramaphosa’s ascendency. Hope refuted the claims – just like Pele. So is this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?
Could this perhaps be why the president opted to pull out instead of robustly engage Given Mkhari about suspicions of abuse because he feared Mkhari may himself refer to known suspicions against the president?
In the end, though, I find it troubling that our poster boy for difficult conversations, the negotiator for our democracy, has the stomach for these conversations with killers of freedom fighters but chooses to kick his younger brother down the abyss.
