Most thinking South Africans (ie. those who live in the Cape) belong to a thing called “JWI News” (https://jwi.news/notices), which was established by Jacques Weber. It is up-to-the-minute, incisive, and runs on email circulation only.
He has, of course, already produced a critique of last night’s speech on corruption by our illustrious President (see https://jwi.news/notices) and being far more of a diplomat and professional politician than me, he’s been quite receptive – even praising – the speech. And indeed it is good. So far as it goes.
But it contains the same glaring flaw as all previous attempts to beard this particular rampant lion: it is firmly and resolutely anchored in the past. It deals with nothing recent. The President is still dealing with Apartheid crimes, and the Arms Deal. He bandied the term “State Capture” about quite a lot, but that’s become such a cliché that without clear reference to specific incidents it’s just an “out there” bogeyman and the ANC, which is basically a South African crime syndicate, uses it all the time in a desperate attempt to false flag the real culprits.
“We are investigating…” is code language for “we know bloody well who the culprits are, so in order to protect them we’ve put the whole incident into a legal freezer where no-one can touch it under the sub judice rule on the understanding that if that culprit ever displeases us in the future, we can take it out and defrost it” – kind of, like blackmail.
There’s an awful lot of alleged investigating of the distant past going on, simultaneously with an awful lot of current theft, embezzlement, lying and corruption. The general idea is that the present gets drowned out by the noise of the past. If you can make enough noise about the past, the present eventually becomes the past, by which time the culprits have gone off to the cemetery, the old aged home or the Intensive Care Unit, from where it seems virtually impossible to get them into a witness box.
Snowball the Pig from George Orwell’s 1984 may have gone off to Trotter Heaven many years ago, but news of his demise has not yet reached the ANC and as far as they are concerned, he’s living just over the hill and “we are investigating …”
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© HARRY FRIEDLAND, MARIMBA 23 October 2022
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