ONE of the telling ironies of the KWV champagne swindle was the whereabouts of the managing director of the co-operative’s international division when the scandal broke. J “Kobus” van Niekerk, identified in KWV documents as having given the go-ahead for the manufacture of fake champagne for export, was himself abroad last week – leading a South African delegation at a European Union meeting in Brussels to discuss an international agreement on trade- related intellectual property rights.
The hypocrisy of the KWV – a regulatory body for the South African wine industry engaging in wholesale swindling – would be laughable were it not for the likelihood that they are going to get away with it. The reluctance of Customs & Excise to respond to the scam suggests their connivance with it. The reaction of the Office of Serious Economic Offences in the Cape – that they are awaiting a complaint from an affected party – smacks of the lethargic incompetence we have come to expect from the our so-called criminal justice system. With the commendable exception of Business Day, the lack of response of the media – notably the national broadcasting service – to the scandal points to a cynicism bred of the same factors which gave rise to the hypocrisy at KWV.
It is a cynicism over which leaders of the National Party presided during the years of misrule, while crowding hypocritically into the pews of the Dutch Reformed Church. It was a hypocrisy which encouraged murder and theft in the name of the national interest and reduced the forces of law and order to a loose alliance of gangsters. It is the corruption of purpose which led the KWV in the name of sanctions-busting patriotism to throw its lot in with international crime syndicates. It is the confusion of morality which lingers on in the public parade of convicted crook Greg Blank on our television screens as an archetypal hero of our times.
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, observed Samuel Johnson. And 200 years later Desmond Tutu’s truth commission is proving the point, rooting out the scoundrels behind the atrocities of the apartheid era. In recognition that atrocity comes in many guises, the commissioners have recently turned their attention to the press, in search of the scoundrels who poisoned the well-springs of national self- awareness, as well as lickspittle members of the medical profession, who abused the Hippocratic Oath rather than stand up to the bullies of the security police.
The champagne scandal and other instances of collaboration with the apartheid state suggest that the business community also has a past to own up to and ask forgiveness for – and perhaps even offer reparation for. It is time Tutu turned his commissioners’ attention to a canker at the heart of South African society exemplified by the Kooperatiewe Wijnbouwers Vereniging.