Corruption can start big. A tender to supply overpriced coal to a power station or a dodgy bridge to nowhere. Fifteen percent for doing nothing on a multibillion-rand locomotive contract. A top job at an airline. A cabinet post.
Or it starts small. A discount on a luxury SUV. A couple of grand for groceries, rent, a flat-screen TV, medical bills, petrol money. A nice watch. A shopping trip to buy those shoes with the red soles. The drip, drip, drip of petty cash.
South Africa is now in the grip of two corruption probes. One hearing evidence of police corruption, political interference in crime intelligence, jobs for friends, cover-ups, vanishing evidence, murder, bodies dumped in lakes.
The other — examining infiltration into the Independent Police Investigative Directorate — picking over who was invited to a braai or a “book launch”, a document entitled “Joining the dots”, witnesses who don’t seem to remember seeing, doing or saying very much, and MPs demanding apologies for things that might have been said or were misheard and maybe deliberately so.
A never-identified employee at a heavyweight state-owned company once stole a device designed by engineers working for my father, reverse “engineered” it, and sent it back to him in pieces. It took years to unpick the rotten tendrils. There was someone, though, who knew something. He said he would testify in a patent lawsuit.
On the Sunday before the trial was due to begin, the old man asked me to go with him to the witness’s home, for he had gone quiet. The driveway was littered with autumn leaves. Net curtains sagging in filthy windows. A broken gate. No furniture, no car, no dogs. No witness. No trial. Someone got away dirty.
Back to the commissions, then. One, in which the cross-examinations feel like scalpels slicing off lesions, may lead to real justice. The other, shambolic one, feels like autumn leaves in an empty driveway.
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