At last.
Guptagate has come and gone.
The Executive has been exonerated.
The opposition parties had their opportunity to grandstand and show their voters that they are still in parliament.
The pro-ANC and anti-ANC analysts and commentators had their 15 minutes of fame.
But alas. Nobody really looked at the positives that came out of the entire saga.
It was all glass half empty stuff.
I prefer to look at the glass half full side of things.
For the first time in a very long while our dear President had full credible deniability.
The closest he got to the entire debacle was the receipt of the very elaborate wedding invitation.
Not a single person told No. 1 that the Guptas had requested to land their chartered jet at Waterkloof airport.
When our Minister of Defence refused the application she never thought to mention to her boss that she had this silly request from the Guptas.
Ditto our Minister of Transport and our Minister of International Relations and Co-operation.They kept mum about any approach made to them.
Our President was therefore blissfully unaware of all these goings on and thus he was completely dumbstruck when he was told that the GuptaJet landed at the countries biggest airforce base. A condition that prevails up until today as he has not said a word about GuptaGate other than darkly muttering that people should stop dropping names.
Secondly, South Africa is really turning out to be the land of vast opportunity and wealth for immigrants. The Guptas came to South Africa in 1993 and 20 years later they allegedly own senior ANC officials lock stock and two smoking barrels.
Just think how empowering this must be to other immigrants. One just has to look at how African immigrants have taken over the retail business in the townships. Soon they will have their spaza shop chains all over South Africa. In 20 years they might own Pick n Pay or Shoprite. Then they can own the ruling party lock stock and barrel.
Thirdly, our government officials have really been fully empowered by their political bosses. How else would it be possible for the head of government protocol to convince the Airforce that they should allow a private jet full of wedding guests to land at the premier airforce base of the country. By all accounts he then got the South African Police Service to provide full VIP services and to top it all off, he managed to convince off-duty Metro Police to moonlight as security guards.
I say: Give that man a Bell’s if he was not already given a few boxes of much more expensive single malts.
So all in all I think South Africa came out pretty well from the experience.
I am now waiting for the wedding of the niece of those three Somali brothers who own a spaza shop in Paarl and who in 20 years time will own Pick n Pay.
I have no doubt we will extend the same courtesies to them and let their chartered jets all land at Wingfield Airforce base for the wedding festivities at Ratanga Junction.