Gayton: From mampara to madala?

“FUCK him and the horse he rode in on. And fuck his whole rabble." – A progressive liberal friend on Facebook about Gayton McKenzie.

“Gayton McKenzie is a dumb prick, and he should never have been made a cabinet minister." – Richard Poplak, progressive liberal journalist from the Daily Maverick on X.

Poplak continues: “Gayton McKenzie is the most openly and rabidly anti-black minister South Africa has had since apartheid. This will for sure have an impact on his portfolio, and not a good one. He should go back to playing gangster on Truth Social."

The two individuals I'm quoting are people with whom I almost always agree, who see the world like I do, whom I would trust to represent me in anything. Except when it comes to Gayton McKenzie. I like him a little more than they do.

Poplak's outburst surprises me a bit, because although he has never been one to mince words, his aggression doesn't match his otherwise more amused, ironic or flabbergasted tone.

What is he reacting to? All I could find that was recently posted on X was an excerpt from a 10-year-old SABC TV news bulletin in which McKenzie predictably made his particular case against immigration by comparing South Africans to Zimbabweans: “The problem with us, as black people, we are lazy, and people are scared to say that. I'm not scared to say black people are lazy … Look at the Pakistanis, they come all the way from Pakistan and they open shops in our backyards. You know, it is so confusing. I asked my friend, ‘why do you let this guy open a shop in your backyard?' He said, ‘hayi gee, I don't have funding'. I said, ‘you've got an iPhone, that phone is six grand'."

Although McKenzie clearly identifies himself in the video as part of “black people", one gets the feeling the clip was dredged up to try to embarrass him, since he has recently hammered so hard on his identity as the leader standing up for the “coloured" community, which he says is forgotten by everyone.

He’s an ‘ou’, just like us

McKenzie often makes me laugh. You can just as well transpose those words about black people into the Afrikaans accent of a white Marble Hall citrus farmer who employs illegal Zimbabweans and wants to justify his labour policy. Exactly the same argument that McKenzie uses when he claims we must chase illegal foreigners out of the country.

Street charisma is one of the secrets of McKenzie's success. The idea people have is that he says it like it is, with common sense, without being afraid. McKenzie would much faster sit down and become pals with the Marble Hall farmer than almost any ANC politician. The same goes for the workers on the farmer's farm and the Indian traders in the town.

McKenzie's new campaign as sports minister to get people to walk or jog like him and weigh themselves on Wednesdays (Wednesday Weigh-Ins) looks so obvious, but it shows emotional intelligence at a level we see in few other politicians. We see Gayton on the video, with his big flat bare feet, in an ill-fitting yellow T-shirt and flabby shorts, with his body clearly not yet in the best shape, and he weighs himself on a bathroom scale in front of the nation. It's been a long time since we've seen a politician do something with which so many people can emotionally identify – it's almost like he's a member of the family.

His ability to attract attention is unparalleled. He had barely become a minister before he was trending on every social media platform for his comment about the growing township motor sport, spinning.

To great acclaim, he immediately announced that the expensive superfan programme would be scrapped and the money would go to needy sports clubs. Rather controversially, he also published a list of all the artists who had received Covid money from his department.

He is making a big noise about how he is going to return national sports like rugby and cricket to free-to-air television channels so everyone can watch, although for now it looks as if he is underestimating the complexity of international television rights.

He has removed himself and a few departmental officials from a trip to a book festival in Venezuela, to make room for more writers.

He still manages to turn any bad news about himself to his advantage. For example, last week he was crowned Mampara of the Week by the Sunday Times over his speculation that a Miss South Africa finalist, Chidimma Onwe Adetshina, has a Nigerian father and is not a South African by birth.

He immediately fought back with a tweet that portrayed him as the fighting underdog and unleashed a flood of negative commentary towards the Sunday Times. The newspaper undoubtedly got the worst of it.

Gayton, the dark side

Who Gayton McKenzie is depends entirely on where you stand and look.

From the perspective of a principled liberal journalist, Gayton McKenzie is certainly someone who should be condemned and kept away from the levers of power. He is a convicted armed robber, he supports the criminal state of Israel, he expresses strong anti-immigration sentiments and rhetoric in a country where we always live close to the xenophobic powder keg, and he is pro-death penalty for certain exceptional cases. He is a typical right-winger.

He somewhat redeemed himself after his incarceration through his revelation of corruption in the prison system and his nationwide talks on how he's left his life of crime behind.

However, he has never swum in entirely clear waters. There is always a murky little cloud, and sometimes it gets rather muddy.

There is still a corruption case from his time as mayor of the Central Karoo district municipality, involving about R3 million from a fundraising banquet in Sandton that disappeared. There are allegations that he is still involved with gangs. There are questions about the public swimming pools and toilets he promised to fix with his Central Karoo salary, which he allegedly did not draw.

There was the huge controversy in 2010 about the R330 million he had distributed to his family and friends as a mining consultant for Gold Fields' black empowerment consortium. And so the stories go on.

McKenzie frequently relates how he has started various enterprises from scratch – a security business, a chicken and fish business, diamond mines, publications, nightclubs and so on. Except for the publication of his books and the nightclubs, little is known about the rest, other than what he tells you.

His books are allegedly bestsellers, and it's all a variation on the same kind of Ayn Rand philosophy of you being in control of your own fate and chasing your dreams.

This is McKenzie from the perspective of a politically correct liberal journalist.

The meteoric trajectory

However, there are other perspectives. As a different kind of journalist, one who is always looking for a good story that will get people talking, as a novelist, screenwriter or playwright, I can see almost four narratives in McKenzie's life that would work.

He is an icon of redemption, resilience, ingenuity and life.

I'm not sure how much one can believe what McKenzie says about his own life, but certain facts are undisputed. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison at the age of 16 for armed robbery. And 20 years later, he was in charge of one of the largest mining companies' empowerment budgets, worth hundreds of millions of rand, and became exceptionally wealthy.

The fact that he was able to move from one to the other is astonishing, whatever his methods were. Spinning the story of his criminality into an asset is not something everyone can do.

His ability to use this as a basis to build a reputation as a speaker at major corporate events, and from there become a mining consultant who disburses millions of rand, including to uncles on the street in Heidedal in the Free State where he grew up, makes me shake my head in disbelief.

The fact that he was able to establish a political organisation that shook the DA's cage in the Western Cape in the last election and fared better in the national election than the Freedom Front Plus, the ACDP, the UDM and the much-discussed ActionSA and Rise Mzansi, cannot be overlooked. When he and Kenny Kunene founded the Patriotic Alliance back then, I gave it a year to fall apart.

Can Gayton perform on the big stage?

I have no doubt that fresh and undiluted bullshit is part of McKenzie's suite of survival skills. To what extent it plays a role is difficult to see.

But now McKenzie is in the big league, and how he survives from here on will probably depend on a different set of rules than before. The benevolent rogue personality will no longer be good enough for every situation – he will have to develop something more presidential for larger opportunities.

Whether he survives depends on how hard the past comes knocking at his door, how much old debt may be called in, and how strongly he can resist the temptation of easy corruption.

It will also depend on his ambition. He can decide whether he has hustled himself to this point just to continue hustling on a larger scale for a term or two before returning to a life in obscure diamond mines and dubious nightclubs. Or he can decide to put the bullshit away and become a vehicle for hope and constructive discussion and plans.

Our sports and arts ministers have so far been nothing but bad apples who have cost money and wallowed in the pits of corruption. But this is a position where you can make an almighty difference for teams and clubs that need resources, for athletes who cannot access the right coaches and events, for sports that are hampered by poor and corrupt management.

It is a position where you can build a reputation as a promoter of all people, free from the hackneyed ANC rhetoric. If McKenzie can see it and take his redemption to the highest level, it can be a launch pad for something bigger.

Hopefully, he can.

♦ VWB ♦

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