There are lessons to be learned for everyone from the Sarafina 2 debacle...
CAPE TOWN -- the Mother City. My mother lives here for several months every year, still, the city nearly always feels to me like a foreign country.
Finding Dullah Omar asleep in the seat in front of mine on the flight while Alec Erwin busied himself with paperwork nearby only made the feeling more surreal, after all, our politicians are, in many ways, the most foreign of us.
So I found myself having dinner with the deputy editor of the Cape Times and the political correspondent of the Sunday Independent. We were joined by an ANC MP and another party stalwart.
The MP wanted to know why a National Party senior member was allowed to accept the anonymous donation of a house to use while he was in office, while Nkosazana Zuma was not.
"Wait a second," I told her. "We all know the Nats are dog faces. We expect them to be responsible for underhand business. The ANC on the other hand has assumed the moral high ground and must be judged at that level.
"Having said that, I must say Nkosazana Zuma is the best minister of health we've ever had. She should apologise for overstepping her authority and we can all get on with our lives."
Actually, there was one Nat who was not a dog face. Dr Nak van der Merwe, PW Botha's minister of health, opposed the separate funding of hospital services under the Tricameral Parliament.
The plan, which would have caused hospital services to become "own affairs" would have resulted in duplication of many basic services and overall degradation of quality.
Dr van der Merwe acknowledged that separate was not equal by pointing out that "a tuberculosis bacillus recognises no boundaries". By uttering those words, he earned my respect, and proved that he was a failure as a politician.
Dr Nkosazana Zuma is also no politician. She lacks the arrogance. She lacks the pomposity. But in the two years since she took office, she has left an impressive trail of primary health care improvements. Improvements like greater access to clinics for most of the population, free health care for children and pregnant women, greater awareness and availability of contraception, a massive immunisation programme for polio and measles, and an anti-tobacco campaign that has been extremely effective.
All these improvements will pay real financial dividends -- not today, but years from now -- when we count the profits from reduction of numbers of pregnancies, deaths from measles, crippling from polio, and smoking-related illnesses.
But the woman has the public-relations profile of Bambi under the headlights of a rapidly-approaching semi-articulated 40 ton juggernaut.
Standing nearby, the opposition parties have sharpened knives and forks in anticipation of a road kill feast.
In the midst of this all, Madiba, the bunny hugger traffic cop, dashes onto the scene, yanks her off the road, and tickets the truck driver -- the press.
He's wrong. The press is driving legally. She had no business being on the road.
This is not the white-dominated press and businesses versus the ANC in a campaign to oust Zuma. Black journalists, almost without exception, have called for transparency and accountability. Madiba insults us by suggesting that these opinions come from our white owners.
Had Zuma simply apologised for not having followed procedure, Madiba could have accepted the apology and shouldered the responsibility on behalf of the government.
We know the money has not gone into Zuma's pocket. This is not corruption, this is mismanagement. One is a firing offence. The other is not.
But the ANC government fails to recognise it is no longer a resistance movement where secrecy on its part and blind faith on that of its followers were prerequisites for its survival. It is the government in power in a democratic society. There are rules that come with the job.
And one of those rules is that countries have to be run to standards the world economies understand, not on trust.
The ANC must live up to those standards. Until they do, the rest of the world will continue to view them as an unknown, unpredictable quantity.