Why does Africa not incur our wrath?

Something is far from kosher in Equatorial Guinea, but the ‘moralists’ are turning a blind eye to it

20 Jan 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  Rand Daily Mail

There’s a question, coupled with a riddle, designed to shake off the back-to-work blues: Which is the richest country, per head of population, in Africa? Theoretically at least, each citizen there should be more than three times richer than the average South African.

Clue: If you have not paid much attention to it before Monday this week, you should now know the country, as its city of Mongomo, home town of its president, was the site of Bafana's defeat by Algeria in the African Cup of Nations.

 Answer: Equatorial Guinea, the continent's third-largest producer of oil after Nigeria and Angola. Its population of just 650 000 people in this tiny country should enjoy a standard of living approximating that of the average citizen of Portugal, which it closely matched in terms of GDP per capita, at more than $20 000 (R232 000). South Africa's GDP per capita is just over $6 600.

The riddle: Why does 80% of Equatorial Guinea's population live in abject poverty? According to the UN, fewer than half its population has access to clean drinking water. About 15% of Equatorial Guinea's children die before reaching the age of five.

According to a recent article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal, it is "one of the deadliest places on the planet to be young".

 

The simple reason for the wealth gap was explained in the same article.

"Energy revenues, derived from pumping around 346 000 barrels per day, have flowed into the pockets of the country's elite, but virtually none has trickled down to the poor majority."

Of course, given the collapsing price of crude oil, the country's ruling elite might be soon be less rich than they are currently. But they've done pretty well since Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo seized power in 1979 in a bloody coup against his uncle.

Today he enjoys, along with his great riches, the awkward title of being "Africa's longest-serving dictator”.

That award, conferred on him last year by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, jostles along with others awarded to the great man and his regime.

"Worst of the worst" was Freedom House's description of the state of the country's political and civil rights. Reporters Without Borders, which monitors the state of media freedom in the world, described Obiang as a "predator of press freedom'', and Transparency International places Equatorial Guinea in the top 12 of its list of the "most corrupt states in the world".

But if you think the father is bad, the son is apparently even worse.

Teodoro Jr, recently installed by his dad as the country's vice-president, is also a prodigious collector of real estate across the world. This includes a home, recently condemned as rat-infested, in Cape Town's Clifton Beach. But this pales in comparison to his Paris mansion, estimated to be worth more than R1.35-billion.

The headline-catcher for "Junior" was his pile in Malibu Beach, California. It was seized, along with a Gulfstream jet, Michael Jackson memorabilia and eight Ferraris by US Justice Department officials. In court papers, the prosecution averred that his riches were a consequence of corruption and were "inconsistent with his state salary of less than $100 000 per year". Last year, to settle the criminal indictment, Obiang forfeited some $34-million of these assets to the US government.

Needless to say, back here in the more modest (even Nkandla seems a shack by comparison) South Africa, there is no "boycott, disinvest and sanction" campaign against Equatorial Guinea and its ruling family. Standard Bank, the sole African sponsor of the CAF — which is highlighting this benighted country — is not having any of its branches picketed or boycotted.

No, we reserve our ire and concern for human rights for one country, and just one chain store that stocks its products: Israel and Woolworths.

Strangely enough, Obiang and his dictatorship was once described by George W Bush's Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice as "our good friend". Hardly surprising since, pre-fracking at least, most of that country's oil exports went to the US. But Bush had a more arresting phrase as the educational-reforming governor of Texas, before he became president. He said that accepting poor results in black and Latino schools was the consequence of "the soft bigotry of low expectations".

With all the current swirl and tweeting around racism, real and imagined here, one can only assume that holding Israel, for example, to the highest standard of human rights behaviour and expecting nothing of the sort in, say, Equatorial Guinea is the current and local equivalent of the soft, or loud, bigotry of low expectations. The local BDS crowd expect every human rights box to be ticked by Israel, and hold no mirror up at all to a slew of states far closer to us.

On the Woolworths issue, matters become even more interesting. It was with a sense of macabre fascination that last year we watched Cosas, going one better than the usual suspects in the anti-Israel brigades, deposit pigs' heads in the Sea Point branch of Woolworths. The basis for this act was to discomfort local Jewish shoppers using the kosher section of the store. The stand-out problem here was that there is no specific kosher section in the shop.

Yet just across the road, a gleaming new Checkers store has an aisle of kosher and Israeli products. But Checkers has been untouched by the boycott or any pigs' heads.

That's another riddle in a maze of inconsistencies in this selective targeting. Is Israel the only country worthy of protest action? And is it the fact that the chairman of Woolworths is Jewish, or is it that it is seen to be the place where the elite shop that makes it alone the target? As they say in the classics: "I think we should be told."

Helen Zille is 'fighting back'? I thought the DA banned that phrase

1 December 2014  | Tony Leon | Original Publication: Rand Daily Mail

As the tide of woeful news grows, predictions of a dire future are gaining strength with some notable exceptions

Where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit. It's really quite amazing how the very same set of facts lead to radically different conclusions about what they mean. Take the travails afflicting South Africa at the moment. They make a long and depressing list and you're spoilt for choice on which to highlight.

Our ever-weakening currency - or the country's share price, as it is sometimes termed - has fallen more than 70% against the surging greenback in just over four years. The public service wage bill now gobbles up 42.2% of all government (read taxpayer-funded) expenditure and three million civil servants make the government the biggest single employer in South Africa by far.

Yet, across a swathe of functions, the state is barely functioning, from supplying electricity anywhere to safe drinking water in Gauteng.

 

The flagship national airline is the scene of boardroom battles even as it battles to stay aloft. The South African Post Office cannot deliver letters and even the much-admired South African Revenue Service is mired in allegations that one of its units ran a brothel.

Property rights, one of the key compromises in the constitution, are under threat, and not just from the land grabs by the Economic Freedom Fighters in Pretoria. A flurry of laws are excavating under the foundations so carefully constructed at Kempton Park in the early 1990s.

Our growth rate has dropped from the 5% achieved a decade ago, and the once-mighty tripartite alliance has been rent asunder.

The day after Nelson Mandela died, in December last year, the parliamentary speaker of his time, Dr Frene Ginwala, noted that in place of his normal batik-style shirts, South Africa's first democratically elected president "always wore a suit to parliament as a sign of his respect for the institution". And it wasn't just his sartorial choices that mattered both there and in the courts of law. He arrived, did his duty and even took the occasional judicial and political bullet that went against him.

The scenes of chaos in parliament two weeks ago - especially the fateful decision to send the police into its inner sanctum - show how far we have fallen since then, not least in our own estimation and in the eyes of the world, which has long since moved beyond the "miracle rising" narrative we once gave to a globe in need of heroes.

But is it a tipping point into failed-state status or simply a fork in the road to more competitive politics? Despite its enormous numbers at the moment, is the ANC staring long-term decline square in the face?

Of course, the governing party will reel off a host of statistics, from three-million houses delivered to 16million social grants deposited every month, to justify its claim that life is better today than it ever was.

But even for those sitting far away from government, commentators reading the tea leaves predict different futures. Just last week, two of these scenarios were on offer.

Financial analyst Magnus Heystek read the last rites for the rainbow nation on the back of what he called "jackbooted thugs in the most hallowed halls of democracy". I never thought of my former place of work in such sacrosanct terms. His conclusion set the Twitterati ablaze. Forecasting the demise of offshore investments, Heystek prognosticated that within five years the effects of weakening economic growth and further currency decline will see the "jackbooted bankers" from the Reserve Bank - "overnight and without warning" - switch off the offshore investment tap.

So, if you think your rand-hedged investments are a safe haven, think again, he suggests. He ends his cheery note with this zinger: "There are only two types of ex-Rhodesians in the world. Those who took all their money out of the country and those who wished they had."

DA leader Helen Zille is made of sterner stuff than this "apocalypse just now" scenario. Strangely, she describes herself as "exhilarated" by the recent events inside and outside parliament. She reads into the "deep crisis" in party and state the seeds of a campaign of "fighting back" (long after I thought the phrase was banned by the party) by civil society and through the accumulation of actions and pushback, "a prefect storm for fundamental change".

Her reference point is the Leipzig Moment in East Germany 25 years ago, when the people's demands for reform and freedom became unstoppable and eventually toppled the government and the Berlin Wall.

Of course, a major factor beyond "people power" in that revolution was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's decision not to use force to prop up his satellites. Locally, Marikana suggests that a different scenario could unfold here.

But what certainly links the collapsing Soviet empire with our state, apart from ideological nostalgia, is that when the money runs out, all settled futures become unknowable.

As US scenario consultant Ian Wilson said: "However good our futures research may be, we shall never be able to escape from the ultimate dilemma that all our knowledge is about the past, and all our decisions are about the future."

Perhaps before either packing your bags or at least sending your assets offshore while you can, the more earthy remark of former editor Steve Mulholland might chime with both history and expectation. He said: "Ever since I was five years old, I was always told that South Africa had five years to go before it exploded. Well, I'm 78 and we're both still here."

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

Populism is the wrong solution, but it might rattle the right cages

28 Sep 2014 | Tony Leon | Sunday Times

Most Ninety-one year olds would probably consider it an achievement to get up in the morning, have a cup of tea and watch television. But Dr Henry Kissenger, former US Secretary of State, decided it was a good age to produce a new book, in this case a 432- page door stopper entitled, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History.

Actually, as Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, noted in his review of Dr Kissenger’s tone it could more accurately be entitled” World in Disorder”. Mad jihadists of the Islamic State beheading western journalists, a very reluctant (‘ambivalent’ is Kissenger’s phrase) US hyper-power re-engaging in a war in the Middle East in response; Russia throwing out the post -cold war settlement by invading neighbouring Ukraine, Israelis and Palestinians fighting an endless conflict, China upsetting its neighbours, Japan militarising, Iran nuclearizing, and anarchic permafrost settling upon the once hopeful Arab Spring.  In West Africa the once contained and rare Ebola virus has leapfrogged borders.  It has mutated from an epidemic  to a life-shattering endemic disease which, according to this week’s  forecast of the US Centre for Disease Control and Infection could get far worse by orders of magnitude killing hundreds of thousands of people and ‘embedding itself in the human population for years to come’.

Difficult indeed, in these hard times, to be optimistic about the world and human conditions.  But according to the well-credentialed contrarian Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, there’s actually more realistic hope about than at any other time in human  history.”The world might have gone to hell” he writes, “but it is getting much better”: the average person (meaning someone somewhere in the poor world ) lives about a third longer than he or she did fifty years ago and buries two thirds fewer of his or her children and the amount of food available per continent has risen dramatically,  so that famine, once a semi-permanent condition in the third world is in fact today rare ‘despite a doubling of the population since the early 1960’s.

But even if, objectively, the human condition has improved, the body politic appears diseased.  The institutions designed to improve the global order seem stuck in the past and unfitted for the present, never mind the future.  The United Nations is paralysed to act on the new threats to the planet such as climate change.  The World trade Organisation meant to harmonise global trade abandoned the Doha round after a decade of wrangling . The International Monetary Fund’s inability to reflect the economic realities of 2014 rather than 1945, has seen the rising powers of the South establish its own vehicle for development in the form of the BRICS Bank.

And when it comes to national politics, we see the rise of populism practically everywhere: nearly half of Scotland last week surrendered to its siren call, the once-fascist National Front in France is on the up and up, and even that bell weather of humane social democracy Sweden has seen the rise of nativist racist parties.  But as Philip Collins  wrote in The Times what we are witnessing in the world is ‘’the bacterium of anti-politics”. When you give up on traditional parties bringing real change to your life or the national condition you embrace the virus of anti-establishment organisations.

This rather dark global lens was given local resonance in a recent talk at the Cape Town Press Club by author –journalist Ray Harltey. He was speaking in the wake of the charm offensive launched in its rather traditional confines the week before by uber-populist Julius Malema. Far from infantalising politics as he is accused of doing, Juju had played his audience  and fine -tuned his message with the assurance of a political Stradivarius.

The far quieter but equally assured Harltey reminded us of the vast numbers of South Africans who have succumbed to the virus of anti-politics by opting out of the system entirely: of the 36m South Africans who could have registered and voted in the last election only 18m actually did so and of that total, the ruling ANC received only 11m votes, a far more modest haul than its apparent supremacy suggests. This led former parliamentarian, Dr Denis Worall to conclude, that while the “lords of Luthuli House” (to borrow the phrase of the DA Chief Whip) fixate on how to fix Malema, good and proper, we should actually thank Malema for ‘’making Parliament more relevant.”

After all when did you last hear the ANC Secretary General fussing about ‘’the dignity of parliament” as Gwede Mantahse recently did? When in fact did the ruling party last worry about parliament at all? Populism and its nasty noise and tactics can do much damage, but perhaps in the corroded corridors of power in South Africa, it might also be rejuvenating.

 

 

How much more abuse can the constitution take from Zuma?

31 August 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  Sunday Times

Our President’s manoeuvres are sailing ever closer to the wind

It is not clear what reading matter President Jacob Zuma’s Kremlin hosts provided for him at the Dacha where he rested during this week’s visit to Russia. The timing of the trip is doubtless a coincidence, but he certainly chose a useful moment to escape from local difficulties, ranging from an unbowed Public Protector, an uber- aggressive Economic Freedom Fighters’ leader and the smoking gun perhaps lurking in the spy tapes. 

But it is certain that Zuma was not given sight of the article which journalist Philip Stephens published recently in the Financial Times.  He had also gone to Moscow, but neither for a rest nor to nudge along unnecessary nuclear power station contracts.   Stephens went there to try to divine why Zuma’s host, President Vladimir Putin, was behaving as he has been these past months: annexing Crimea, arming  rebels in Eastern Ukraine, banning McDonalds hamburgers  and even eclipsing South Africa’s sclerotic  GDP growth which in Russia is likely this year to spiral down to zero percent.

Stephens quoted the aphorism of a local who explained Putin’s hostility to his neighbours and the West as being a case of “when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.” Putin is not the last or first leader who, confronted by the unknown, seeks refuge in the familiar.

The South African presidency seems to have taken this Russian recipe and applied anabolic steroids to the formula. Perhaps not for nothing was Zuma’s pre-presidential legal approach, when escaping the coils of looming corruption charges,  dubbed the “Stalingrad strategy.” But combat by exhaustion, delay  and destruction is one thing when you are fingered for the criminal dock, and quite another  when you are the president charged with upholding and enforcing the constitution. President Richard Nixon tried much of the same thing during the imploding Watergate crisis.  But  he was undone by his own voice on a tape, not admittedly by the voices of others, as in the case of the local spy-tapes, which might or might not provide a rational basis for the non-prosecution of the president on the corruption charges which cleared Zuma’s path to the presidency.

But before any of that unspools after the Democratic Alliance’s victory in the Supreme Court of Appeal on Thursday, which could disprove the National Prosecuting Authority claim of a conspiracy against Zuma, and the springboard (or excuse depending on your viewpoint) for dropping the corruption charges, there is the matter of Nkandla, Parliament and the Public Protector.  Here matters are both, simultaneously, more   and less straightforward. It’s literally a matter of what she said and he didn’t say or do.

Thuli Madonsela in an explosive letter last weekend, and the origins for its appearance onto the front pages remains contested, stated very plainly that the President’s response to her report on Nkandla which required him to repay an undetermined amount for the costs of improving his private residence amounted, in essence, to a non-response and an evasion of its central findings.

Weary readers might recall that Zuma’s response was to instruct a subordinate, the minister of Police,  to determine his culpability for any of the costs. What she didn’t say, but which the author Upton Sinclair once famously did, is that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” So, it’s an interesting stratagem to get a minister who enjoys the perks and privileges of office to decide whether the person, on whom his continuance in high office solely depends, needs to pay back multiple amounts of money.

But Madonsela actually went further; she suggested not only might this be a bad idea, but in fact it was ‘illegal’ since it conferred on the minister powers which he did not have and which usurped the powers of the court, the only institution which could review her findings. Second-guessing by a cabinet minister, in other words, is not just poor form but is, on her interpretation, unconstitutional. 

Naturally the African National Congress launched a ‘fight back’, by labelling her response to the president’s non-response as “undermining parliament”, pursuing a ‘personal matter’ and ‘playing to the gallery’ among other sins. Madonsela in response stated that this was a direct assault on her office and independence in violation of the constitution which proscribes any interference in the functioning of her office.

At this stage in proceedings, including the EFF’s interruption of proceedings in parliament two Thursdays ago, we might well ask the essential question: how much more damage can the constitutional instruments designed to combat corruption and rein in the abuse of office withstand, especially from those charged with protecting them?

Long ago, and not in Russia, but from its nemesis ,the United States, ,a famous, independent  voice of warning  sounded in a dissenting judgment against the encroachment of the state pursuing improper  ends . In 1928,  Justice Louis Brandeis wrote,  “Our government…teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

Wise and prophetic words in America then and for South Africa right now.

 

 

The Big Read: Nazi or just plain nasty?

27 Aug 2014 | Tony Leon | The Times

Since there are very few clean hands in the chaotic scenes from parliament on Thursday, when the Economic Freedom Fighters disrupted President Jacob Zuma's question time, we can cast the net wide to finger the underminers of our democracy.

ECHOES IN RED: Nazi Party deputies in the Reichstag in Berlin in 1933. Before it came to power the party created disorder on the streets and in parliament
Image by: UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

"Those who howl loudest today have themselves excavated under the foundations of our parliamentary democracy"

One unlikely, admittedly marginal, suspect on the wanted list is the mild-mannered and urbane minister of tourism, Derek Hanekom. You might recall that in May 2010, as chairman of the ANC disciplinary committee, he sentenced Julius Malema - at a time when his party thought it could contain his outsize ego inside its tent - to a course in "anger management" as "remedial action of a corrective nature" for criticising Zuma. Well, the country and the world saw last week, at least before parliament cut the live feed, just what a crashing failure that correction proved to be.

Then we have the ANC secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe. Some weeks back, the EFF politics of mayhem and chaos was getting a dry run in and around the Gauteng legislature (before its advance into the hallowed portals of the National Assembly). Mantashe compared their conduct to that of the Nazis, drawing howls of outrage from Juju and Co. But Mantashe was onto something with that analogy, especially for those who do not see the clear and present danger of the EFF's disruptive and anarchic tactics.

Mantashe was wrong to compare the EFF's end goals to the unique evil of the Third Reich but he was right on their tactical similarities.

In his Concise History of Nazi Germany, Joseph Bendersky explains - in immaculate detail - how the Nazi Party conducted itself in the Reichstag (parliament) of the Weimar Republic between 1930 and 1932, the crucial period when Hitler's party had only 18% support but enjoyed outsize attention, not least through its outlandish tactics.

The party pursed what Bendersky calls a dual strategy: it disrupted and paralysed the existing republican political system, while trying to use the same democratic system and electoral processes to win control of the very system it was so energetically undermining.

"They intimidated their opponents, they created disorder in the streets and they kept themselves in the public eye." If Malema has not read this history he is certainly doing a good job of copying it in both spirit and letter.

Inside parliament, the Nazi deputies "used obstruction tactics to hamper the governmental process. Nazi deputies disrupted parliamentary sessions with catcalls and unnecessary debates on points of order, and they opposed every attempt at serious legislation,'' Bendersky writes.

It was precisely because Germany witnessed its pre-war democratic institutions being trashed by profoundly undemocratic forces within that when, on the ashes of the vanquished Reich, a new order was created in 1949 the drafters of the federal basic law or constitution were very careful. It prohibited any entity from fundamentally undermining "the democratic basic order". That is how both the resurrected Nazi Party and the West German Communist Party were banned by the federal constitutional court.

Our own constitution does not contain an equivalent clause. If it did, there is every likelihood that the EFF would be proscribed.

But before Mantashe and other ruling-party heavies get too self-righteous, they would do well to take a long, hard look in the mirror. Because although Malema's tactics shock, and perhaps even rather thrill, weary taxpayers who wouldn't dream of voting EFF but who admire the way Malema puts Zuma to the sword, there is nothing hidden about the EFF playbook. They have the subtlety of a sledgehammer or a jackboot. But what of the more insidious undermining of parliament as a serious institution, one that the constitution mandates as the most important forum of governmental accountability in the land?

Here indeed Malema's now nemesis, the ANC, should take a deep bow. It is worth remembering that those who today howl loudest at the EFF's disruptiveness and disrespect for democratic decency have themselves with great enthusiasm and deliberation excavated under the foundations of our parliamentary democracy.

It was not the EFF that turned a democratic parliament into a forum of non-debate and threadbare accountability. It was not the EFF that scrapped parliamentary interpellations. It was not the EFF that decided it was proper for its national chairman to be also the Speaker of parliament and the person in charge of its institutional independence.

According to the chief whip of the official opposition, John Steenhuizen, it was not the EFF either that in 2013, in splendid defiance of the constitution, ensured that only 17% of all oral questions submitted to ministers were actually answered by them in the House.

Nor was it the EFF that steamrollered 53 bills through parliament last year, of which "only 20 were properly debated by the House, in just 28 hours".

You do not need to condone Malema's tactics to understand the seething frustrations that erupted last week in parliament; nor why they enjoy such widespread support.

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

Ray Hartley Reviews The Accidental Ambassador by Tony Leon

07 Jul 2013 | Ray Hartley | Original Publication:  Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine

A stint in Argentina gave the former opposition leader a fresh appreciation of South Africa, writes Ray Hartley

PICTURE a classroom somewhere in the bowels of the Department of International Relations and Co-operation in Pretoria. Seated at the desks are three soon-to-be ambassadors, Tony Leon, Zola Skweyiya and Ngconde Balfour.

They are being prepared for their new missions in Argentina, London and Botswana, respectively. Tony Leon, by his account – and it is the only account – is taking it all rather seriously. Zola Skweyiya admits that he is doing it out of political duty rather than desire, and Ngconde Balfour is frequently absent and wont to moan that he is being taught things he already knows.

The classes are Leon’s introduction to his new life as a representative of a government that he has criticised as corrupt, inefficient and incompetent in his years on the opposition benches.

After leaving parliament, Leon was pleased to lose his political straitjacket.

“I will certainly not miss the often dreary non-debates about non-issues which, over the past decade, often passed as the staple of parliamentary engagement. Nor will I mourn, too deeply, the dark arts of political in-fighting and intrigue with which political leadership is associated,” he wrote in the Sunday Times in 2009.

The course and a rapid introduction to Spanish behind him, he leaves South Africa for Buenos Aires to begin his new life as ambassador.

On his return, Leon is a changed man. He has not, he is quick to say, abandoned any of his principles. But he grudgingly concedes that he sees South African politics in a different light. His experiences while in Argentina have made him think again.

No longer “leader of the opposition”, he finds to his surprise that new doors are open to him. Leon has entered a new life in a realm somewhere above the grind of politics where there is more hope and possibility.

The then defence minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, whom he has always viewed as a preening “princess”, alights from the steps of the plane in Argentina to give him a warm hug. Leon observes that she is, it turns out, effective and functional as she deals with the signing of some or other much-delayed treaty that Leon had badgered her to attend to.

In Argentina’s president, Cristina Kirchner, he sees what a real princess can do when given the levers of power. Benefiting from several plastic surgeries, Kirchner sports “Angelina Jolie lips”. He makes this observation as he hands her his official accreditation.

Princess privilege, in fact, knows no bounds. Leon discovers Kirchner’s government has banned the Big Mac from the McDonalds menu in Argentina, apparently because of The Economist‘s Big Mac Index, which it uses to calculate the true values of foreign currencies. The magazine retaliates by refusing to carry any of Argentina’s official statistics. It is more than an amusing sideshow, Leon points out. By manipulating the inflation figure, Kirchner is able to cheat buyers of inflation-linked bonds out of money.

Members of the embassy staff, by contrast, are not princesses. They are professional to a fault, Leon discovers. Dirco itself runs a very tight ship and is proud of its clean status with the auditor-general, going so far as to warn Leon not to tarnish its reputation by spending improperly.

The secretary-general of the National Union of Mineworkers, Frans Baleni, visits. Leon notes that South Africa’s laws, which protect labour, pale when compared to those of Argentina, where it is all but impossible to fire someone. Baleni shows big eyes at the thought.

In South Africa, Julius Malema advocates nationalisation in a populist assault on the investment community. But Malema is disciplined, sidelined and fired. Nationalisation is rejected by the ANC’s party conference.

In Argentina, the pouting president nationalises the country’s leading oil company by fiat. Newspapers, which are critical of her administration, are victimised. The tax collection agency is used to target dissenters.

Leon’s own eyes widen at everyday occurrences, like purchasing a pastry, which is a nightmare. There is a queue for the pastry and then a second queue to pay for it as an old shopkeeper thumbs his way through an order book in which each and every sale is recorded. Everything starts late. Meals frequently take place in the early hours of the morning, leading to unproductive mornings.

On tour with The Accidental Ambassador, his book on his experiences, he is back home and lighter and freer than when he left. There are no queues at the shops in Joburg’s Hyde Park shopping centre. A book club hosts him; he once again mentions Kirchner’s Angelina Jolie lips and can’t resist a swipe at his successor, Helen Zille, pointing out that Botox is fashionable in the Democratic Alliance these days.

He is at pains to point out that he remains somewhere in the DA firmament, but there is just a hint of bitterness. He appears slighted that he is not recognised for having created the platform for the party’s growth.

The irony – and in South Africa there is always irony – is that Leon and Zille have, sometime in the last five years, quietly passed each other like ships in the night. Zille has gone in the opposite direction – from independent journalist and NGO leader to party partisan. Leon, on the other hand, has had a relatively easy walk from politics to freedom. – @hartleyr

The Accidental Ambassador is published by Pan Macmillan

The Accidental Ambassador: From Parliament to Patagonia by Tony Leon
EAN: 9781770102415