TOM EATON: You can’t keep a good man down — and a bad penny always turns up
Extract
Accountability at last. Ebrahim Rasool, disgraced and recalled as premier of the Western Cape in 2008 for allegedly bribing Independent Media journalists, and having just overseen the ANC’s worst ever election result in the province, is reportedly being punished — by being sent to the Western Cape legislature. Yay, New Dawn!
If any teens are reading this and struggling with the bit about “disgraced and recalled”, I should explain that long, long ago we rubes actually thought it was scandalous for a politician to pay journalists for puff pieces. Nowadays that’s called “the business model at Independent Media”, thanks to the R2bn of pension savings handed to it by the PIC, but back in 2005 it was quite a thing. Poor Rasool. If only he’d hung on for one more year he might have found himself floating free in the warm, comforting diarrhoea of the Zuma cesspool. Brown envelopes full of cash wouldn’t have been a scandal: they would have been grounds for promotion. But it was a different time, and in 2008 Rasool was packed off as an ambassador, the standard punishment for unravelling ANC sockpuppets. Still, you can’t keep a good man down, or Ebrahim Rasool, and in 2018 he returned from the wilderness to head the ANC’s election campaign in the Western Cape.
If only he’d stuck with brown envelopes. Short of...
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