After the Bell: I bling therefore I am

It’s hard to take the ANC seriously sometimes.

Especially when it talks about dealing with “corrupt cadres” or its latest promise to actually make the economy move again.

But what made me laugh out loud while going through Daily Maverick’s coverage of the party’s National General Council was President Cyril Ramaphosa’s injunction that they “must stop showing off”.

I mean, this is the first political party in the country to make showing off a thing.

It has never happened before in our politics that people did what people in the ANC have done.

It started, of course, with Tony Yengeni, who emerged from prison after serving time for arms deal corruption and ended up driving Maseratis to ANC events.

He wasn’t the only one, but he became the poster child for it.

Now that Yengeni has left the ANC to join Jacob Zuma’s experiment in parliamentary chaos we rely on the history of Fikile Mbalula to remind us about the highlights of showing off.

This is a person prepared to seriously suffer for fashion.

Whether it be the (slightly unkind but still funny) moment when he dressed like someone from Takalani Sesame, the day he played the Besuited Ghost of Christmas past or the time he spent a fortune of somebody’s money attending a massive boxing bout in Las Vegas, he has shown himself to be a serial offender.

As recently as the ANC’s last election campaign he decided it would be a good idea to use a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon on the campaign trail.

We all know how that ended for the ANC.

I’ve never really understood why people feel the need to flaunt what they have.

I realise I come from a particular middle-class culture and a particular period in time, but to me it seems a little off. If you have something I’ve often felt it might be best to keep it in reserve. Don’t let people know what you have, you never know when you’ll need to catch them off guard.

But I’ve come to understand it’s actually completely different for many other people.

For them, it seems to me at least, there is a need to show the best possible part of yourself to create a kind of aura of strength.

Their tactic, perhaps more effective more than mine, is to put what they have up-front.

This means that, even if you can’t really afford it, you have to bling up.

A fascinating article in the Sunday Times over the weekend really explained this well, looking at a video of the former city manager of Ekurhuleni, Imogen Mashazi. It showed her wearing a watch worth R1.2-million, while her necklace was nearly R800-000.

While she had been earning nearly R5-million in that post it still seems unlikely that someone would spend nearly a quarter of their annual salary on a watch.

That is, unless they really felt they needed it.

There is an alternative. That their true salary is not what they get from the government. That, almost obviously, they are getting much more money from somewhere else.

Corruption, of course.

This has always been the strange thing.

If you earn R100 a month from your public office and you rock up to some public event wearing Bvlgari slip-slops that are worth R1,000, you are basically saying you are corrupt.

This is one of the reasons Pauli van Wyk’s exposés about Julius Malema, Floyd Shivambu and VBS were so powerful. The articles explained what we all knew: there was no way their parliamentary salaries could pay for what they (Malema and Shivambu) were wearing.

What I find even harder to understand is going on social media to display your bling.

It’s one thing to be going into a tough business meeting, horse race or court appearance and want to dress up your best. But to then put it on social media? The only thing you get from that is the dopamine hit as your mentions rack up.

It didn’t end well for Hamilton Ndlovu, though.

He’s the guy who decided to spend R11-million on cars at the start of the pandemic and then put them on Insta.

As a result the Hawks investigated, the contracts his companies had with health departments were reversed and he found himself in the dock.

All because of his ego.

And to an extent, that must be what bling is all about. It’s about your ego.

Meanwhile, for me, the more interesting people are those who don’t do that but have money anyway. The ones who have real wealth and never display it.

You might see them in the nicer parts of Plett over December, or taking a quiet constitutional in Saxonwold of a Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps the greatest concentration will be in a particular part of Stellenbosch.

But they’re never, ever, on Instagram.

This may be the difference between capital and money.

Money brags. Capital accumulates. DM