Tolerating Tolashe spells doom for the ANC

As Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis reported earlier this week, Sisisi Tolashe is accused of employing a young woman through her department, only for her to work as a child-minder for Tolashe’s daughter.

In a story similar to so many histories of people who have been trafficked, forced to work or otherwise abused, this person then had to pay over a large portion of her salary to a person who appears to be Tolashe’s daughter.

The fact that this is the minister of social development, a post designed to protect the most vulnerable in our society, only adds to the horror.

In a society in which young women are so often abused in many different ways, the actions of the leader of the ANC Women’s League in herself abusing a woman financially are the latest in a long list of awful ironies by people in this position.

Bathabile Dlamini was both leader of the league and social development minister when she helped Cash Paymaster Solutions perpetuate its contract to pay out social grants long after the Constitutional Court had found it to be illegal (she was eventually found to have lied under oath).

Another former league leader, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, was minister of defence when she smuggled a young woman from Burundi into South Africa on an SANDF plane, a situation which has still not been properly explained.

For Tolashe, this follows a pattern that appears to indicate she does not respect the law, or her role in government.

President Cyril Ramaphosa himself has had to confirm to her, in writing, that she did not have the power to move against her department’s director-general. It is a power solely in his purview that she tried to abrogate for herself.

And she has employed people in her department in positions for which they are not qualified.

Vehicles of dishonesty

Then there is the issue of the cars, which implicates both her and ANC second deputy secretary-general Maropene Ramokgopa.

They were both given SUVs by a Chinese company that has started a production facility in South Africa. The cars were officially donated to the ANC Women’s League.

But as Davis has shown, there can be no doubt that both have treated these cars as their own personal property. The league has said on the record in both cases that it knows nothing about the vehicles.

The vehicles have been used by the children and a close personal friend of the ministers (presumably, they did not have a use for them themselves, because the state will provide for their transport needs).

While Tolashe now claims to have returned the vehicles to the league, as Davis has also explained, in fact, one of the “returned” vehicles is not the same as the one given to her.

That’s because the donated vehicle had been sold by her daughter.

All of this exposes the lie that Tolashe told two weeks ago. As the Sunday Times reported, she tried to claim that she had not formally handed the cars to the league to protect them from being seized by creditors as league assets.

This claim, in a statement to the ANC’s Integrity Committee, surely cannot be accepted. If the committee, or for that matter the ANC’s national executive committee, do accept it, it will prove the party’s integrity machinery is happy to be lied to.

Worse, it might well be seen as an insult to the authority of the party. It’s essentially like a defendant telling a judge that they’re stupid.

While Tolashe has defended herself in public, Ramokgopa has not appeared for interviews on this subject. But she has denied receiving the cars.

Again, as Davis has shown, this cannot be true.

How then did her son end up driving one of these cars, and why is the other being driven by a man known as Luvo Makasi?

One of the features of this scandal is that it shows how people linked to the ANC can maintain access to power, no matter what they do.

Makasi played an important role in the Water Affairs Department while being labelled “Nomvula Mokonyane’s Ben 10” by City Press. Despite that, and his disastrous reign as chair of the Central Energy Fund, he is still benefiting from access to power through the ANC.

This again shows how the ANC tolerates, or even actively encourages, people who have abused their power in the past to do it again.

Ramokgopa has not given a cogent explanation for any of this. And yet, curiously, she has not come under the same pressure as Tolashe.

Campaign catastrophe

All of this is not just revealing about how leaders in the ANC use their proximity to political power for themselves and their families.

It also shows how they are happy to steal resources from the party for their own benefit. It is not just that they are abusing their power, it’s that they’re literally taking vehicles from the ANC for themselves.

ANC members who will soon be asked to persuade frustrated communities to vote for their candidates might well wonder how they will answer questions about people who steal from their own party.

One can imagine a public debate in a community where the SACP candidate reminds voters how the ANC tolerates this behaviour – of people stealing from it – and yet expects ordinary people, who have already suffered immensely, to vote for the party again.

In the 2019 national and provincial elections, Ramaphosa was able to win some voters by promising that the party would now “renew” itself. The results of the 2024 election showed that most voters did not believe him.

The real power of this scandal might be that it again shows that the ANC has not learnt anything from the 2024 elections.

If Ramaphosa fails to act against these two ministers, the only lesson that voters can draw from this is that he has not learnt that you need to move beyond talking about “renewal”.

You must also act. DM