Does what happens in Dubai stay in Dubai?

We may have forgotten, but tourism minister Lindiwe Sisulu was in Dubai for four days in December. It was there she wrote, or began, the article that ended up, on publication a few weeks ago, insulting African judges in our courts as “house negroes” with “colonised minds”, and probably will lead to her eventual dismissal from the government.

Ostensibly, Sisulu was there to visit the South African pavilion at the Covid-delayed 2020 World Expo. What else she might have done in Dubai, or who else she may have had tea with, we do not know.

What we do know is that she came back a fully fluent, out-of-the-closet, fist-quivering apostle of the ANC’s radical economic transformation (RET) faction, otherwise known as the Zuma faction, after the disgraced former president. And, as we also know, the RET/Zuma faction is financed by the Gupta family out of their forced exile in Dubai.

Obviously, I am not for a moment suggesting our Lindiwe might have had tea with Atul. Heaven forfend. But there’ sa swagger about her these days which you normally don’t get from ANC ministers dependent on their positions for their salaries and perks.

Neither Sisulu nor the RET faction nor its funders could have dreamt of the scale of success her attack on the judiciary and the government would have. The media went mad for it. The acting chief justice held a press conference to denounce her. ANC elders had a go.

You just cannot buy the kind of publicity Sisulu’s critics have handed her since that first, turgid, article. She’s no fool. She was privately schooled in Swaziland and has a history master’s from the University of York. She has been a full cabinet member since 2001 and an MP since 1994.

In her article she wrote of ANC leaders: “In 1994, they struggled to put petrol in their cars. Some didn’t even own one. And yet when it is election time, you will hear them spouting, ‘Our people, our people.’ Surely, this was not the vision of the real liberators. Those whom we revere as the ‘Struggle Stalwarts’. They have gone to their graves, with a dream deferred, their life’s work besmirched, and their sacrifices spat upon. What happened to us?”

“The ANC is what happened to us” is one obvious answer. Sisulu promises to change all that. She wants to be leader. The RET faction and its backers would not say no either. The question is what the actual leader is doing about it.

On Wednesday, more than two weeks after Sisulu’s attack on the judiciary, President Cyril

Ramaphosa had a private meeting with her. It seems he suggested that maybe what she had written was a bit difficult. It appears that they agreed to find an intermediary to settle on a form of words for an agreeable retraction.

We can’t be sure, however, because, frankly, we cannot trust either now to tell the truth.

But late on Thursday the presidency put out a statement saying Sisulu had apologised at the meeting. “I retract unequivocally my hurtful comments,” the presidency quoted her as saying. “I apologise for and regret the hurt I have caused the judiciary.”

Sisulu quickly hit back. “I wish to categorically disown this statement in its entirety as a misrepresentation of the said meeting I had with the president,” she declared. Ramaphosa’s office said it stood by its version. It was late now, anyway. All would be cleared up in the morning.

But it wasn’t. And what we have now is a crystal clear test of leadership. Sisulu has openly defied the leader of the ANC and of the country, despite a weak attempt to blame Ramaphosa’s media team. He has already demoted her once (last year, from water & sanitation to tourism) and now he must fire her.

It’s difficult, but that’s the thing about leadership. Ramaphosa does politics before principle and even if he fires Sisulu, they will still meet at every ANC national executive committee meeting and most Mondays at the ANC national working committee, which they both attend. And of course he risks her campaigning against him for the ANC leadership between now and December, when party elections are due.

But that’s his problem, not ours. As former president Thabo Mbeki asked the ANC recently: “When we talk about ANC unity, who are we trying to unite? You can’t say we must unite ordinary members of the ANC with criminals.”

Exactly. Ramaphosa needs to win re-election as party leader in a straight race. Not another deal. And he needs to win on merit, not pusillanimity. By not axing Sisulu now he risks, in a country already on its spiritual and economic knees, history recording his first and possibly only term as head of state as a quivering failure.

I am not for a moment suggesting our Lindiwe might have had tea with Atul. Heaven forfend