This week’s Sharp Sharp finds Rob Rose and Zukile Majova, joined by Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential, digging into a pattern that runs right through South African politics. Old scandals do not disappear. They just get reassigned.
First the DA. Former leader Tony Leon’s lobbying firm has been getting government ministers to meet with clients including SpaceX, and John Steenhuisen is now publicly accusing new leader Geordin Hill-Lewis of backstabbing him after the two had struck a deal on the leadership handover. Zuks calls it what it is. Factionalism, the same disease that has eaten away at the ANC for thirty years, now showing up inside a party that was supposed to be different.
Then the ANC. Dina Pule, fired by Jacob Zuma himself in 2013 after her boyfriend allegedly pocketed millions meant for an ICT conference, is back in cabinet. She takes over a portfolio the ANC Womens League has quietly controlled for more than twenty years, one minister after another pushed out for corruption and quietly replaced by the next.
Patrick draws the thread wider. From Dick Cheney and Halliburton to Tony Blair’s Britain to Donald Trump pausing America’s own anti corruption law, this is not just a South African problem. It is what happens everywhere when the people who make the rules are also the ones who profit from breaking them.
They close on the fallout from June 30 and a genuinely fascinating World Cup catch up, including a Paris bar full of French fans cheering for Cape Verde.
Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
