There a was a telling moment, on July 6, when Dame Diana Johnson reduced her namesake, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (no relation), to a stuttering mess with the words: “Could you just confirm?”
“I would appreciate a yes or a no. Did you meet former KGB officer Alexander Lebedev without officials when you were foreign secretary on April 28 2018?” the Labour MP asked the British prime minister, as he sat before the parliamentary liaison committee on what would be the eve of his resignation.
“I-I-I-I, ah, would have to check,” the prime minister said. He paused, then offered: “I have met the gentleman in question ... I won’t deny that I have met him ... I think I probably did ... on the occasion you are mentioning ... I met him in Italy, as it happens.”
Instead of stretching weeks or months, Johnson’s usual lie-deny-deflect-admit-apology act played out in a solitary minute. In 60-odd seconds, he’d gone from “needing to check”, to remembering precisely when and where he’d met the former intelligence agent. You could almost see the realisation dawn that this was precisely the kind of question that had got him into hot water repeatedly over his 14 years in politics.
Not helping his case will be the claim by podcaster and former Tory minister Rory Stewart that he was told the party Johnson attended with Lebedev in Italy was one where women had their “tops off”. And The Guardian reported Johnson had been spotted alone and dishevelled at an Italian airport at the time, and was heard telling a fellow passenger he’d had “a heavy night”.
Johnson, perhaps more than any politician in UK history, has got away with lying both in and out of parliament without consequence — until now.
Deflection, equivocation, answering the question they want to answer, ambiguity and a healthy dose of BS have always been the variegated clubs in the politician’s golf bag. But, with notable exceptions (think Watergate), the outright lie to the legislature has traditionally been considered beyond the pale.
As history shows, however, SA has had some whoppers of its own …
White lies
Take Cecil John Rhodes. In his political and financial life, the mining magnate and politician did an extraordinary amount of lying. But perhaps his most notable attempt to withhold the truth and suppress evidence at an official level was his performance at the inquiry into the Jameson Raid — an exercise in “prevarication and deceit in lieu of helpful testimony”, according to his biographer Robert Rotberg.
And when, after the 1898 election, he was taken to court for apparently bribing the electorate, he developed a profound amnesia. He was unable to recall many of the facts or provide his accounts, which had suddenly gone missing.
What was more, just before that same election, Rhodes had secretly bought the Diamond Fields Advertiser. When asked in cross-examination just why the Kimberley newspaper was so supportive of his campaign and whether he “ran” the paper, he replied: “If you mean it was paid — certainly not.”
He was, of course, technically correct; he was not paying it to support him, he had bought it to do that. An almost fantastically identical set of events would play out 80 years later, in what was perhaps the first straight-up lie told in SA’s parliament.
It was the mid-1970s, and suspicion was rife that the National Party (NP) government was up to a series of dirty tricks. Only, nobody could prove it.
As minister of information, Connie Mulder was at the heart of it all. He knew precisely where millions of rands of government funds were going for covert propaganda programmes — including to The Citizen newspaper.
The ever-present gadfly Japie Basson, then in the ranks of the Progressive Federal Party, had for some time been suspicious of The Citizen, with its pro-NP line and its seemingly magical ability to access government information. And so, on May 10 1978, Basson put Mulder through his paces in parliament.
When Basson rose to ask if the government funded The Citizen, Mulder responded that the government did not “own” the newspaper. But Basson wouldn’t give up. He rose again: “But that was not the question ... I once again ask a simple question directed at Mulder and require a direct answer.”
Mulder then uttered: “The government does not give funds to The Citizen.”
It was a bald-faced lie — and one that would badly damage Mulder’s reputation. He was at the time the heir apparent to the NP “throne”, but when the lie was revealed, even members of his own party were deeply shocked.
PW Botha beat an unrepentant Mulder in the ensuing battle for the party’s leadership, and Mulder was later expelled from the NP as what came to be known as “the information scandal” broke over his head. With that, his political aspirations were largely finished.
The postapartheid theatre
The history of lying to parliament in the democratic era got off to a relatively quick start when, in 1996, Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, the health minister in Nelson Mandela’s government, lied over the funding of the Aids awareness play Sarafina 2.
Sarafina 2, written and produced by NDZ’s friend Mbongeni Ngema, was to be funded through a contract the health department had signed with the EU.
That R14.3m would be spent on the work of a close friend of the minister’s raised eyebrows. But, asked about the issue at a parliamentary committee hearing, NDZ claimed the “EU was informed” about how the money was to be used. Only, an EU official said: “Sarafina 2 was not included as such in the contract,” adding: “This contract requires agreement [as to how the money was to be used] in advance.”
The first postapartheid parliamentary lie had been exposed.
Mandela leapt to NDZ’s defence, claiming it was simply media hype, and that Dlamini Zuma should be left alone to do her job. There was, at the time, a certain sympathy for “mistakes” like this in SA’s new government.
But as academics Themba Sono and Richard Calland both suggested, forgiveness could not last forever, cautioning that lying to parliament had the potential to be “very dangerous”.
Former president Jacob Zuma would show just how.
Lying at Nkandla’s door
Lies around Nkandla began in 2009, when journalist Mandy Rossouw took it on herself to visit Zuma’s KwaZulu-Natal homestead. There, she discovered the beginnings of a complex that would cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of rands.
When the presidency was asked who was footing the bill, it said the upgrades were being undertaken at the Zuma family’s expense.
Four years on, when public protector Thuli Madonsela submitted her initial report on Nkandla, cabinet ministers tried to quash it, arguing that “security breaches” had to be omitted. When that didn’t work, they found another method of evasion: the parliamentary lie.
A cabinet task team was set up to “investigate” Nkandla, leading public works minister Thulas Nxesi, his pants ablaze, to utter the immortal words “fire pool”.
Of course, the “fire pool” claims set off a series of political flare-ups, with several others joining the fray with bizarre claims, justifications and lies. National police commissioner Riah Phiyega, for example, claimed that, in rural areas, a swimming pool and bucket were required to put out fires. And, elsewhere, it was reportedly claimed Nkandla’s paving was a “security feature” that, among other handy uses, would stop women in high heels from sinking into the mud.
Once the fire of lies has begun to spread, it seems, it’s very difficult to put it out — even with a fire pool.
Here lies Ramaphosa?
Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration began with one of SA’s more honourable moments — one that, in many ways, seemed to hark back to a previous era of politics. In an early act as president, Ramaphosa appointed as finance minister Nhlanhla Nene — a man famously “redeployed” into unemployment by Zuma.
Nene had claimed in a 2016 interview that he’d never formally met the Guptas. Yet, at the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture, he admitted this was not the case — and then promptly resigned.
Ramaphosa said at the time that Nene feared the admission of his lie would “detract from the important task of serving the people of SA as we work to re-establish public trust in government”.
But how do those words now sit with the man who spoke them? With the Phala Phala scandal stalking Ramaphosa, even former Corruption Watch chair Mavuso Msimang has called for him to step aside.
To date, Ramaphosa has resorted to the sub judice claim (meaning “before a court or judge”), saying he may not talk about the theft at the farm and its apparent cover-up. Only, the matter is nowhere near the courts. And when asked directly about the alleged dollar-stuffed couch, he has chosen to go off topic.
The Ramaphosa presidency started off as one of renewal. Many hoped it would be a move away from the “post-truth” zeitgeist that manifested in the Zuma era. But the culture of lying has apparently become a strong centripetal force. Will CR be drawn into the orbits of the likes of planets JZ and BoJo — if he is not there already?