The Art of Manyisplaining: How Jimmy Manyi almost broke the Zondo commission

When Mzwanele “Jimmy” Manyi strode into the Zondo commission on Wednesday afternoon, it wasn’t his first visit to the State Capture inquiry — but they surely cannot afford another.

Not if evidence leader Kate Hofmeyr is to avoid a murder charge. Not if any of us is to continue to cling to the faltering belief in the old epistemological cornerstones of facts, evidence, or truth itself.

Of course, the Zondo commission has seen unco-operative witnesses before. Few can compete with the Zuma father-and-son tag team for Olympic-grade ducking and diving. JZ — in what looks increasingly likely to be his one and only appearance before the commission, due to his sudden onslaught of unspecified illness — sketched a fever dream of international conspiracies and ancient plots. Duduzane played it slick and laid-back: nothing to see here, folks.

But Manyi? Manyi arrived at the commission for his second round this week ready to unleash a nuclear cloud of obfuscation, digression and semantics. Where other witnesses have alibis, Manyi has semantics.

By the time Manyi walked out of the building on Thursday afternoon, all certainties of the universe were lost. Every fundamental mooring of modern life was up for debate. What he gave to the commission was less “testimony”, and more surrealist performance art. (Or was it a survivalist performance art? - Ed)

Here is an incomplete list of some of the words Manyi has now taught us do not denote the flat, one-dimensional concepts we once assumed, but a complex welter of polysemic meanings:

Charges/ To be charged. Manyi has consistently testified that he was not “charged” with any wrongdoing relating to his time as the director-general of labour. On Wednesday, Hofmeyr and Manyi went several gruelling rounds over the definition of the word “charges”, with Manyi ruminating:

“It’s a technical question, whether you have been charged or not.” He admitted to having received “allegations” of misconduct.

On Thursday, in a tremendous Poirot-style gotcha, Hofmeyr produced the smoking gun: a letter written by Manyi in 2010 in which he made explicit mention of the “12 charges” he was facing.

“In November 2010, you had no difficulty understanding that what you had been presented with were 12 charges,” said Hofmeyr, the bespectacled assassin.

“That is not correct,” replied Manyi, with the weary air of a man surrounded by simpletons.

“I put ’12 charges’ here, yes, but the understanding I articulated here yesterday carries. I probably was generous saying ‘12 charges’. I probably should have said ‘12 allegations’.”

Suspension/Firing/Dismissal. Was Mzwanele Manyi placed on precautionary suspension from the Department of Labour as a result of these allegations, and subsequently dismissed? Yes. That’s if you trust a fat dossier of paperwork to that effect, media reports from the time, affidavits from Cabinet ministers involved…

But was he really?

“To say a minister has fired you is like saying oil has mixed with water,” Manyi proclaimed: an impossibility of physics.

Turning to Judge Zondo, and referring to Hofmeyr, he Manyisplained:

“Her disadvantage perhaps is that she doesn’t understand how the public service works. But I can do a quick workshop here.”

Manyi’s interpretation of the Public Service Act — an interpretation disputed by the actual lawyer present, advocate Hofmeyr SC — is that he could not be dismissed by the Minister of Labour, because only the president has the power to dismiss directors-general.

Ergo: he was “dismissed”, but only for play-play.

“I have no evidence of having been dismissed,” Manyi concluded.

“Do you accept that you were fired, whether this was legal or not?” asked Hofmeyr eventually. A vein had begun to throb in her forehead.

“I note your interpretation,” replied Manyi.

Some time later — it could have been five minutes; perhaps it was seven hours — Manyi would refer to “my situation, which colloquially is described as ‘dismissal’ ”.

Shortly thereafter, Hofmeyr could not stifle a sigh of such weariness that it appeared to emanate from her very bones.

“Mr Manyi,” she said, enunciating through teeth that must surely have been gritted, “your letters in November [2010] make it absolutely clear you knew you had been fired.”

“Whatever was purported to have been a dismissal… didn’t really happen,” said Manyi. Case closed.

Relationship. To be fair to Manyi, the word “relationship” is indeed a sticky one, which is precisely why Facebook introduced “It’s complicated” as a means of conveying the ambiguity that so often clouds this concept.

One does not ask as meticulous a word-parser as Manyi about his “relationships” and expect a straight answer. But perhaps Hofmeyr was beginning to lose blood to the head, because in she went: what was Manyi’s relationship with the Guptas prior to his appointment as the government’s communications boss?

“Relationship, chair, is a strong term,” mused Manyi. “I knew about them.”

Moments earlier, he had responded to the question, “How would you describe your relationship with former president Zuma?” with what felt like at least a solid minute of eerie chuckling. Only a semiotic wizard, like Manyi himself, could decipher that laugh.

“Former president Zuma is a very friendly person,” Manyi said, when at last he had composed himself.

“He gets along with a lot of people. President Zuma had a lot of good relationships with a lot of people, and I was one of them.”

Yes. To a man as embracing of the world’s ambivalence as Manyi, to answer a question in the affirmative can only ever be half the story.

“Yes and no,” he responded, when presented with another piece of documentary evidence contradicting his testimony: in this case, that he had worked tirelessly to address procedural irregularities at GCIS.

Earlier, when asked whether he gave instructions to his lawyers to write the letters he had signed, Manyi cogitated: “There’s a yes and a something else”.

To watch Manyi in action was to witness a virtuoso at the top of his game: an artist dismantling with every response the social consensus on meaning itself.

When his thrust-and-parry with Hofmeyr is one day dramatised into a two-hander stage play, there is one particular exchange which will serve as the piece’s climactic moment.

Abandoning the attempt to persuade Manyi that evidence is, well, evidence, Hofmeyr at one point pleaded with him: “Let’s assume that these facts are accurate”.

Shot back Manyi: “Let’s assume that these facts are wrong.” DM