At only 16, Gayton McKenzie’s polite way of asking for pocket money was to press a cold AK-47 against an unsuspecting guard’s temple. Seemingly he has put away the illegal firearms, reinventing himself as a doughty politician, still, it is his former incarnation that the world continues to talk most about.
It’s how some remember him – a stocky menace who wrought mayhem through elaborate bank robberies in a criminal career that eventually landed him inside Grootvlei maximum security prison, heaving a staggering sentence in the company of hardened sorts who hardly flinched at cops or manacles. Admittedly, he was a thug of the unrepentant variety, endured what could’ve been a fatal stabbing behind bars, and wound up traversing the country giving talks in the hope of discouraging youngsters from slipping into the abyss.
As a businessman, alongside former prison inmate Kenny Kunene – somebody he credits for saving his life in said stabbing – he is famous as a witty card sharp, shrewd businessman and – as EFF leader Julius Malema might attest – a character that doesn’t quiver at penning forthright missives to people who are otherwise seen as too daunting. His open letter, Thug to Thug, drips with frankness, tons of sarcasm and leaves the reader thinking, “damn! Did this guy really just write this about the Commander In Chief (or Thief in McKenzie’s phrasing).
Nonetheless, with his criminal days behind him – the Special Assignment exposes on prison corruption now yesterday’s headlines – the nation could finally close the chapter on Gayton McKenzie. Leave him to the pastimes of the rich; playing golf, partying at high-end clubs, being snapped alongside the nauve riche and completely forget about the skollie from Heidedal.
For a while that’s what the nation did.
That is until came the blindside that left analysts floored. McKenzie voted in as the new Mayor of the Central Karoo district municipality in April 2022, a constituency that is as parched and disheveled in landscape as the high unemployment figures and general despondency that plague many of the people. Moving from plush offices in Sandton to take up a job in a town that still harbours glaring problems of race and poverty, he faced an unenviable task.
But it also cannot be said that this did not come without a built-in advantage. His political party, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), although routinely hammering away on the national talking points especially around illegal foreign nationals, is also seen as a refuge for the coloured population who, since the advent of democracy, have long lamented how they weren’t white enough during apartheid and are seemingly not black enough post-1994. McKenzie however insists that his organisation’s doors remain open to anybody who would want to come in.
Since the National Party (NP) – father of legalised segregation – pulled off a dumbfounding victory in the Western Cape at the nation’s maiden democratic polls, sentiments of coloured voters supposedly being bedfellows with their erstwhile white oppressors crept to the fore. Despite the ruling ANC’s efforts to subsequently gain favour with these voters, those have evidently fallen flat. Instead, a bulk of these voters have since been swallowed up by the Democratic Alliance, the Good Party and several smaller entities.
As a people who have consistently stressed their marginalisation, are ravaged by gang warfare and various social ills, it was only inevitable that they too would seek a party ran by people who looked like them and came from where they lived. McKenzie appears to immaculately fit that brief. Instead of being some smooth-talking Ivy League graduate or career politician, here is a man that even the battle-scarred gangster from the Cape Flats might see as a bra van die Kasi.
From common criminal, to business mogul, now to an unrelenting politician who triumphantly stands before the eNCA’s cameras at the Beitbridge border apparently poised as the last defence against foreign nationals attempting to illegally sneak into the country. His accent is unapologetically Afrikaans. He is a big-hearted philanthropist who delivers food parcels to the needy and he is even known to speak in Sabela – the cryptic patois of the prison numbers gang – when communicating with his associate, Kenny Kunene. Who else could woo the notorious – now deceased – Hard Livings gang boss, Rashied Staggie, to allegedly advocate for peace in the ganglands of Cape Town?
Kunene is no less a colourful character. Known as the Sushi King for once having nibbled a California Roll off of the body of a naked model, he has been a sought-after subject with tabloid media. Although he had a short stint with the Economic Freedom Fighters, his claim to fame comes on the back of throwing lavish parties, fancy cars, expensive clothes and The Army: a bevy of long-limbed women in Peruvian weaves all said to be his live-in girlfriends. He was also the flamboyant co-owner of the popular ZAR Lounge nightclub and was bent on attempting to cock-up then Deputy President Ramaphosa’s ascent to power when a salacious video purportedly of one of Ramaphosa’s alleged mistresses was leaked on his website.
Nowadays he seems to have dusted off the drama – at least in the public glare – and is often spotted in reflector jackets and workman boots as he supposedly tackles the issues affecting the Johannesburg Metro. He’s even toned down on the cocksure language of opulence and framed himself as a noble man who seeks nothing but to deliver the people from the ruling ANC.
This then is a most incongruent duo to pursue public office. Ex cons. Flashy consumers in this the world’s most unequal society. But let it not be said that either man lacks charisma or appeal particularly with those who’ve grown wary of the intolerably moribund nature of the pervasive political rhetoric. Add to this the bizarre twist that they may even find that their supposed vices are considered honourable virtues in some quarters. They have paid their dues, goes one defence, whilst those who should long have been sharing a cell with the 26s saunter about scot free in the echelons of power.
It’s been over a year since Chief Justice Raymond Zondo released the last of his reports into state capture which implicated no less than 1 438 people and entities in that orgy of looting yet seemingly no one has gone to jail. Nor faced the music in this campaign that was clearly aimed at hollowing out the state and granting the ANC and its cronies rewards beyond imagination. Nearly R1 billion later, those reports now gather dust, state-owned enterprises are on their knees and the SA citizen is still reeling from the pinch.
Even the Ramaphoria Ayahuasca the nation optimistically took big swigs from as the incumbent president came into power, emphatically declaring his New Dawn has, years later, only left the nation quite literally in the dark. 2024 had barely begun when SA was told to brace itself for yet another salvo of rolling blackouts. The massive job creation that was envisaged around 2018 was, if not a pipe dream, mostly piecemeal gigs to give the Ayahuasca lulling qualities. And the nation would also learn that the squeaky-clean billionaire president might’ve had a habit of stashing – gangster-style – swathes of foreign currency into furniture. Though he has since been cleared of any wrongdoing on the matter by the public protector, the court of public opinion remains dubious.
So when suspicion is laid at McKenzie and Kunene’s door, it opens a whole new can of worms. On 17 September The Sunday Times reported that the duo, described as ‘friends’ of former president Jacob Zuma were earmarked as BEE partners in a lucrative R5 billion gas deal with a Russian oil company. The article suggests that on a trip to Russia they were accompanied by then State Security Minister David Mahlobo and had Zuma’s ear. This article appeared just three months before the ANC’s 54th elective conference and around the time of the leaked video and an alleged attempt on Kunene’s life.
It is against this backdrop that McKenzie’s staunch support for fracking in the Central Karoo has been met with misgivings, muddied by the caricature of what politicians have seemingly come to represent: economic opportunists waiting in the wings to capitalise on whatever political mileage they might gain. You know, the old-age stories of access to resources and politics of the stomach.
Be that is it may, as an election contender one simply cannot count the PA out just yet. Unlike the typical bureaucratic hack, McKenzie understands the power of the emotive and is evidently not constrained by party bosses because he is the boss of what he calls a ‘benevolent dictatorship.’ And he has clearly learnt a thing or two about selling oneself: the media are your friends and social media their cousin. Every small victory, every success story, every seemingly negligible gesture of kindness; from stopping to talk with an elderly woman or having a sitdown with an ex con – or more recently, handing out bikes to kids in the Karoo, only for a news report to emerge that the gesture was only a PR stunt – he makes sure the cameras are always there to capture the moment and for social media to disseminate the glad tidings. The PA Facebook page is awash with images of the poor receiving food parcels, his foot soldiers embarking on cleaning campaigns, mending potholes or neglected facilities.
Last month he was on the Podcast and Chill network, a controversial platform that most politicians – apart from the discarded or disgruntled – would rather steer clear of. Not McKenzie. If you had the stomach to sit through the more than 2hour-long interview, you’ll know that with more than 1 million subscribers, it sells itself as the biggest podcast in Africa and McKenzie’s appearance no doubt had a portion of those people enamoured by his accessible manner.
He was professorial, held no punches, had his hosts breaking into raucous laughter and even dropped a few S and F-bombs. Basically, just another ordinary person having a casual conversation tinged with moments of charm, emotion and a few disclosures that had the viewer pressing the rewind button.
Painting himself as a rich man who isn’t dependent on politics, he took big swipes at big business, particularly the so-called white monopoly capital. According to McKenzie, it is the greedy and crooked disposition of these entities that nowadays the late Nelson Mandela finds himself being labelled a sell-out. With the looming general elections, he says, big business are working overnight pooling billions of Rands together in an effort to not only unseat the ANC but to facilitate the Cape Exit and to ensure that the DA goes unchallenged in the Western Cape.
To this end, he goes on, there is already some R2 billion being made available to various new parties on condition that they support the aforementioned ends. McKenzie claims that his billionaire friend Rob Hersov – he who is famous for once telling the ANC to ‘voetsek’ – approached him with a R200 million funding offer on condition that the PA adhere to the above-mentioned requirements. McKenzie says he has subsequently turned down the offer.
As things stand, the party has around 80 seats across various municipalities. McKenzie places the membership at some 400 000. Taking stock of both McKenzie and Kunene’s chequered past, one would easily write off the PA’s prospects. Sadly, the prevailing, corrupt status quo – where accountability is sacrificed at the altar of political expediency – means that whatever ulterior motives the duo may harbour, they would be merely dancing to a common tune.
Afternoon really to me south Africa is really another Country . Here in South Africa Prisoners end up being Presidents and ex convicts are now presidens of influential political parties