A good comedy is not about silly people doing silly things, filmmaker and scriptwriter Jonathan Lynn reminds us. Lynn was co-writer with Anthony Jay of the British satirical series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.
“Comedy has to be about something important — important to the characters, and important to the society in which it is played,” Lynn wrote in Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes Prime Minister. “It is about serious characters doing desperate things because they have left themselves no choice.”
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a useful frame for viewing Phala Phala and its attendant political drama. Clearly, whether President Cyril Ramaphosa should be impeached or not is important, not only to him but to South Africans. Clearly too, he is in a mess of his own creation. Once the theft of money from his farm became public, assuming all was above board he could have explained the transaction clearly and convincingly. That way he could have “killed” the issue. Or, at the very least, he would have blunted its political sting. But he didn’t. Instead, he peddled a narrative that is full of holes.
Ramaphosa wants South Africans to believe his script, which simply put says Santa Claus landed on his farm on Christmas Day in 2020 without notice, bought 20 buffalo for $580,000 cash (about R9m at the time), was quickly whisked away by his elves, and has never been heard from again.
Then there is the issue of the proceeds of the sale. The cash was apparently first stuffed into a safe in the farm’s office, but later moved into a sofa in a spare bedroom of Ramaphosa’s farm residence. Since the farm manager, Hendrik von Wielligh, was on leave, Sylvester Ndlovu seemed to have dealt with Santa.
Ndlovu briefed Ramaphosa on the sale on December 26 when the president visited his farm. Ramaphosa says in his submission to the panel that he instructed Ndlovu to keep the sale proceeds on the farm until Von Wielligh’s return from leave so he could complete the processing of the sale and bank the money. But in his Constitutional Court application he says his instruction to Ndlovu was that “the money must be banked”. Well, there’s a gap there.
In this drama, Ndlovu appears to be the fall guy as is always the case in these matters. As far as one can tell from Ramaphosa’s submission to the panel Ndlovu was fully briefed — one assumes by Von Wielligh — on which buffaloes were for sale and their purchase prices. However, he didn’t get the memo on how to complete the transactions to a stage where he could take the proceeds to the bank.
If Ramaphosa instructed Ndlovu to keep the money until the farm manager’s return, why didn’t he let the farm manager know on his return that Santa had been and gone? This is relevant because Ramaphosa’s account to the panel is that he received two messages after the break-in and theft. The first was from Von Wielligh reporting the break-in. The second was from Ndlovu about the theft of the $580,000. The only reasonable conclusion is that Von Wielligh did not know about the sale and the proceeds stuffed in the sofa in Ramaphosa’s farm residence.
Clearly, Ramaphosa is in the middle of all of this. He was briefed about Santa’s visit and his purchase. Second, it is not so much Arthur Fraser’s revelations that caused Ramaphosa’s problems as his failure to explain clearly what happened; a behaviour that fits in well with Lynn’s description of tragedy and farce as a drama in which the protagonist initiates a course of events that will lead inevitably to his own destruction.
In both genres, Lynn explains, events spin dangerously out of control, “leading eventually to madness, usually followed by a measure of understanding and resolution”. If a play is a tragedy, says Lynn, the audience is asked to empathise with the protagonist. If it is a comedy, the audience is asked to laugh at the protagonist.
Depending on which side of the political and ethical fence one sits, Phala Phala is either a tragedy or a farce. That means one either empathises with Ramaphosa, as his ANC minions and many other South Africans have done, or one mocks him, as some others have.
But laugh or empathise, Phala Phala is about something important to the society in front of whose eyes it is playing out.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesman for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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