Do not even try to suggest synonymity.

On the simmering matter between Action SA chairman Michael Beaumont and Tony Leon’s private company, Resolve Communications, lobbying has suddenly sprung up to be preferred, purportedly free of corruption. The two words, lobbying and corruption, are now cast to be neck to neck in the race for meaning.

This follows outgone DA leader John Steenhuisen’s interview with News24 editor Adriaan Basson.

In the interview, Steenhuisen claimed his exit as DA leader and Agriculture Minister in the GNU had former party leader Tony Leon’s fingerprints all over it.

Entering the fray, ActionSA chair Michael Beaumont’s punches came straight from the shoulder. Beaumont has dared Leon: If you hold otherwise, better bring it on. Beaumont awaits the papers to have the matter resolved in open court.

Although Leon denies being the all-powerful factor in the wheel of fortunes and misfortunes turning in the DA, memory would not let it be forgotten that he had no qualms calling Mmusi Maimane “an experiment gone wrong”.

An experiment. Not a leader. Not a principal of a party he once headed as Leon’s successor. How disposable Maimane was, an experiment. Steenhuisen followed. Hold vigil, who will be next.

At the centre of it all is a public policy application being inundated to bend a knee to Elon Musk’s Starlink entrance to the South African telecommunications market. The preferred carpet being rolled by Musk’s well wishers say, he should be exempted from the standing regulatory requirements applicable to all players in his field. Wrongfooted inside this unsavoury public policy wayward scene is former DA party leader Leon.

In his rebuttal, in his capacity as head of Resolve Communications, to whom Starlink is one of the clients, Leon’s counter is that the conduct of his private business fits the definition of lobbying, not alleged corruption.

Let no amnesia fool fitness of recollection. The Communications Minister Solly Malatsi was made to retreat following hurriedly proposed changes to legislation deemed to be spurred more in line with Starlink’s wishes to enter SA than was coincidental. This was immediately after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s state visit to the United States to meet with US counterpart Donald Trump in the Oval Office on May 21, 2025.

In attendance on Trump’s side included Musk and golfers Retief Goosen and Ernie Els. The two sportsmen accompanying the South African delegation were reportedly a part of Ramaphosa’s diplomatic effort to leverage Trump’s passion for golf.

On Ramaphosa’s side, the delegation included Trade and Industry Minister Parks Tau, International Relations and Cooperation Minister Ronald Lamola, Intelligence Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, and Steenhuisen.

Steenhuisen says his refusal to give credence to false claims of a ‘white genocide’ in SA led to him receiving calls branding him a sellout. That, according to Steenhuisen, set things in motion with a chain of events for his removal as Agriculture Minister by current DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis from Ramaphosa’s cabinet.

In the interview with Basson, Steenhuisen said pressure piled on Malatsi to accentuate favour for Starlink was escalated to his door as DA leader. He found that inappropriate.

Steenhuisen attributed his failure to play ball and the piled-up pressure as the cause behind his removal as DA leader and Minister of Agriculture in the GNU headed by Ramaphosa.

Curiously, now, a bold line between lobbying and corruption is thinned as the statement of the problem. It is presented as a riddle for the nation to solve. Artful distraction right there.

Let there be no beating around the bush. Open advocacy arguably for the public good from public power — elected representatives — to benefit communal interests, fits the category of patent lobbying.

Private soliciting of support from public power — elected public representatives — on behalf of a private business entity for private gain, inescapably walks in the lane of corruption for clandestine benefit and must be treated as such. Are legislators listening for appropriate framing of legislation?

This is where the serviceability test comes in.

The DA chair, Solly Msimanga, should be aware that organic John Steenhuisen had no idea that the game he thought he knew and meant for him, needed compliant serviceability that would claim his head for dissenting.

Being not of organic stock as Steenhuisen, Msimanga would be naive not to know that there are compliant serviceability agenda items unique to him for transacting.

These items would present without prior notice at their striking hour, to honour. Only at that time would he know ‘his Mmusi Maimane moment’ would have arrived. He nevertheless must enjoy the comfort of the chair while it lasts.

In performative politics optics that go with it, blackness is of instrumental value. The preservation of the continued constitutionality of white privilege ministering to unrepentant white power matters the most. A cog, in a machine perfectly designed to produce that outcome, is what Msimanga may or may not be aware of.

The sooner he gets to grips with this, the better for him to know what his blackness is of service to SA politics. Diversity, they call it in the party to blood the optics of the blue wave sailing into the hurly burly of the battle for the hearts and minds in the electoral market.

To comprehending onlookers, blacks are arguably of instrumental value.

Expiry shelf life of that serviceability date comes for all forgetful of the party’s salient core objectives not to mix up white privilege with black poverty. Ask Mmusi Maimane. It was the end of the road for him when he did. Black poverty is not a welcomed song to sing. Job creation made possible by investors responsible for economic growth to make employment possible is the script to abide with.

Patricia De Lille, Lindiwe Mazibuko, Mmusi Maimane, Phumzile van Damme and Mbali Ntuli, all smart people known to Msimanga, are spoken of in the past tense in the party. Herman Mashaba, now head of Action SA, may be one of those inglorious cogs dispensed with but has stories to tell of what was similarly done to him.

Talk of priorising poor communities, much needed investment in their infrastructure wellbeing, insourcing sub contracted workers, doing away with labour brokers from Mashaba’s lips sounded more like being EFF mayor to the DA’s ears. It did not take long bid Mashaba goodbye.

The record shows. Tony Leon called Mmusi Maimane “an experiment gone wrong”. An experiment. Not a leader. Not a principal of the party. An experiment. The DA’s door to Maimane’s face was shut without incident. The DA’s membership was not disturbed. Shouldn’t it have been?

Steenhuisen is the next man on fire. That actually makes the pattern even sharper.

A space to watch who is next.

At the centre of it all is public policy being inundated to bend a knee to interests that share nothing common with justice factors for South Africa’s struggling black majority. It all boils down to “serviceability”. When the “experiment” does not comply, it is discarded.

From Maimane to Steenhuisen the experiments were not conducted without predictable outcomes. Maimane’s juxtaposition of white privilege with black poverty was the last straw to the party line it is not advisable to cross.

To the machine, instruments have their shelf life. The expiry date is pre-written. At the launch of his book Present Tense in April 2021, Leon called Maimane an ‘experiment gone wrong’ for the party. Then came Steenhuisen.

Msimanga would be sleeping on the job not to read the signs writing on the wall. He would be blind not to see the serviceability terms. When that day comes, he will not be the first. The chair he occupies will not be vacant after being exited.

The nation’s IQ should not be made a plaything of hopeless spinning angels to dizzy the unsuspecting public out of a sense of making the difference between lobbying and corruption.

Advocacy serves the public. Corruption serves a client. Instrumentalisation serves a machine.

Oupa Ngwenya is a writer and corporate strategist.