CHRIS THURMAN: Art is a much better way to glam and still avoid state capture
Mixing it up with the political low-lifes really is only for those desperate for some high life
It is a compliment of sorts that full-time narcissist, part-time chef and small-time celebrity David Manal chose to set up shop in SA. Our country is the destination of choice for many a soulless grifter ... just ask the Guptas. Like them, Manal has found in Jacob Zuma a local patron: a dead star (somewhere between a white dwarf and a black hole) to which he could hitch his greedy wagon.
Let me reassure you that what I have just written is not defamation. Manal wears his credentials as “a rich, successful and ruthless businessman” with pride. The blurb for his ghostwritten autobiography, Kitchen Gangster, declares that Manal — born Ihsan Mohammed Manal Abdulatife Abdallah — has been obsessed, since he was a poor kid on the make in Saudi Arabia, with accumulating money and pursuing what he calls “the high life”, with little care for right and wrong...
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