Gayton McKenzie, Donald Trump: Populist powerhouses haunted by dangerous friends - Dirk Hartford

Key topics:Both McKenzie and Trump are facing explosive scandals involving longtime allies.McKenzie, mirroring Ramaphosa’s political playbook, has suspended Kunene from his role as Gauteng Transport MEC and PA vice-presidentThe saga underscores eerie parallels between Trump and McKenzie.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Dirk Hartford.Gayton McKenzie and Donald Trump have a lot more in common than having a courageous business leader and self-styled capitalist activist, Rob Hersov, as their biggest promoters in South AfricaBoth are leaders of parties that are on the rise, and both are now simultaneously caught up in an almighty battle to distance themselves and their parties from the nefarious shenanigans of close personal acquaintances from their past.In Donald Trump’s case, it's the Jeffrey Epstein minefield, which is becoming more explosive every day. In Gayton McKenzie’s case, it's his old bandit, Kenny Kunene, his vice-president in the Patriotic Alliance and MEC of Transport in the coalition government that is busy destroying Gauteng.Both are also convicted felons, and both have ardent support for Israel and hostility to illegal immigrants as central points of their political campaigns. Both claim to be super rich and are larger than life magnetic populists devoted to the media spotlight and the off-the-cuff soundbite.Both are also great spin doctors and notorious bullshitters, adept at making outrageous promises that they then fail to keep, as they move on to their next distracting target. Both now also face their potential nemesis as scandal erupts around their close friends.In a rambling, disjointed live stream of consciousness last night, a stressed and weary McKenzie announced that he was putting Kunene on a 30-day leave of absence from the party and replacing him as MEC for transport. At the same time, a high-powered legal team he plans to appoint will investigate the veracity of any possible allegations against Kunene.Why? Because when police raided the Sandton home of Katiso KT Molefe, a man already charged for masterminding the assassination of a whistleblower in Vereeniging in April last year, they found Kenny Kunene there..Read more:.UPDATE: Police Minister Senzo Mchunu denies ties to tenderpreneur at heart of explosive SAPS corruption scandal.Molefe is one of the people fingered by arch whistle-blower-in-chief KZN police commissioner Nhlanhla Mkwanazi, who recently dropped a bombshell on the nation over his allegations that police top brass and politicians, including Minister of Police Senzo Mchunu, were in cahoots with international drug cartels in flooding the country and the world with drugs.McKenzie is simply following Ramaphosa’s tired playbook in suspending Kunene, who he believes is innocent. Ramaphosa suspended Mchunu and appointed a judicial commission to investigate Mkwanazi’s allegations.When police raided Molefe’s home on Monday, they arrested him and three others for the assassination in 2022 of Oupa John Sefoka (AKA DJ Sumbody), who died, together with his driver and bodyguard, in a hail of bullets in Woodmead.Molefe is being investigated for being the mastermind of at least 10 other assassinations.Kunene, McKenzie, and the PA spokesman have already given different versions of essential details about what was happening between Kunene and Molefe.Kunene says he had briefly reignited his ailing media company for investigative journalism, which he planned to hand over to younger people, and they were there for a story. A contact had led him there. He admits having met Molefe before at a function through a mutual connection with the contact.Kunene, of course, like DJ Sumbody, is a DJ himself and an ex (and maybe current) nightclub owner notorious for eating sushi off the bodies of naked women in his nightclubs.DJ Sumbody’s nightclub interests are in the mix in the trial of the king of Cape Town underworld, Nafiz Modack, currently going on in Cape Town. Five well-known gangsters associated with the trial have already been assassinated. This story is just beginning to unfold in all its gory details. Still, for now, McKenzie is both standing by his belief in Kunene’s innocence, while simultaneously distancing himself from why he was at Molefe’s house and distancing Kunene from his party.Get out the popcorn, folks. We're in for another great thriller.

Gayton McKenzie, Donald Trump: Populist powerhouses haunted by dangerous friends - Dirk Hartford

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