Glittering Gallows

Chapter 3

25 C Chapter 3 fter ceremoniously making a donation of two million rand to the director of the Art Museum at the corner of Schoeman and Wessels Street, Moagi Makgunda walked out of the grand building, a swarm of journalists dogging him. In Gauteng Province, from Pretoria to Johannesburg, right to the rural limits of his jurisdiction, he was always a man of the moment. The week before, amid pomp and fanfare, he had donated three million rand worth of medicines and blankets to the superintendent of Tshwane Hospital, formerly Pretoria Hospital, and as was the case today, excited local and foreign journalists mobbed him from the building to his car. He was a politician; donating for the sake of making news fanned his career, at least from an academic perspective. The society respected him for his generosity and wealth, not his premiership. As premier, he was a haranguing ideologue, almost good for nothing. But as a humanitarian and philanthropist he was extraordinarily pragmatic, and might ascend to the presidency of the country on that ticket. Being the unmarked boundary between Sunnyside and Arcadia neighbourhood of eastern Pretoria, gleeful, over permissive and repulsive in the same vein for its roaming, scantily-dressed teenage prostitutes of extraordinary beauty, shrieking fruit vendors and their orange and banana-laden carts and the city’s bustle of strollers and loafers, many people filled the pavements of the suburb’s jacarandalined streets. When he looked at it, the city was a compound of melodious Vienna, hurly-bustling London and intriguing Munich, panel-beaten into an exotic city exuding beauty, majestic art and a mystic bearing. The garden city was an impressive collection of historic buildings, zoological gardens, alabaster fountain memorials of pioneering colonialists, whistling palm trees, green lawns and cooing pigeons. A 26 Moagi Makgunda arrived at the elite Steve Biko Academy Hospital in an austere S65 AMG six-door Mercedes Benz limousine. Chauffeured and accompanied by a uniformed police sergeant, an authoritative air hovered over the premier as he issued from the backseat of the vehicle carrying a fruit hamper. For security reasons, the officer couldn’t carry the fruits; a bodyguard’s hands had to be free all the time for unimpeded reaction. The premier’s presence evoked both male and female attention, but the latter loudly and openly admired him. In Africa wealthy men never stopped marrying or multiplying the number of their concubines. Though the open adoration mortified him, the whorish glamour on the pavements didn’t distract him. He wasn’t at the hospital to gawk at the suburb’s half-dressed, wholly decadent girls, but to visit his ailing brother, Lebokang, in Unit 912 on the ninth floor. Lebokang Makgunda was gravely ill. So far there was neither diagnosis nor prognosis; therefore there was no optimism he would live, especially when the hue of death was upon him and the doctors had started dosing him with morphine. The premier understood the administration of the drug as a prelude to death. For the past month Lebokang had been turning into inanimate grey matter. People who recognised the politician in the carport greeted him with awe, humility and respect. He was forty-one and the youngest provincial governor in the history of the new South Africa. A frontpage US dollar billionaire and a flamboyant tycoon whose business empire kept expanding like magical dough, he was a role model to many. Without breaking stride, he smiled civilly and waved at the people. A favourite of the President of the Republic who took him to Beijing, Bangkok, Jakarta and Washington DC on numerous occasions, the electorate was of the belief the current leadership was grooming him for the presidency and hoped to see him become the minister of Foreign Affairs, an irrefutable sign that he was the chosen one. From the quantum leaps he made on the political front, a niggling conviction assured him he would hold the reins some day 27 and move around with a cortege, not a police sergeant as was presently obtaining. Lilies, ferns and chrysanthemums were awash in the hospital’s flowerbeds, lending a merry appearance to the institution’s thirtyeight storey building, especially its gargantuan façade. The premier mulled on the trickery in the beauty. Unlike a starred hotel, the Crown Plaza, Sheraton or the Meikles in the city; any hospital was a place of either recovery or death, which was why a mortuary...