So President Cyril Ramaphosa finds himself entangled in a grubby little cash scandal, and whom does he have to thank? Britain. Yes, the same Britain that once ruled the waves and now rules only over its own moral vanity.
The story is as tiresome as it is predictable: a stash of foreign currency, a burglary, a cover-up. And yet the real scandal is not the president’s alleged misdeeds but the smug sermonising from London. Britain’s transparency rules were ‘upheld’ they tell us, as if that were a trophy to be polished.
But what does transparency mean when the very framework of global governance is a theatre of self-congratulation? We style ourselves the paragon of accountability, yet our own political donations are a murky swamp, our party funding a black box. To lecture South Africa is to whistle in the dark.
Ramaphosa’s plight is the predictable result of a world where the former colonists demand virtue from the colonised while hoarding their own sins. The Victorians would be proud: we still peddle the myth of the civilising mission, only now we call it ‘good governance’. And so the president twists in the wind, a cautionary tale not of corruption but of hypocrisy.
Britain’s transparent tradition is a fig leaf. And Africa, as ever, is expected to wear it.
