The assumption that anyone who does well in one area of public life is some sort of “renaissance man” – able to turn their attention to any other field and succeed – is a fallacy to which South African society has recently shown itself unfortunately prone.
Mr Justice Johann Kriegler performed admirably on the Bench, so he is given the job of running the country’s elections – a task demanding logistical and administrative skills for which judicial office offers no obvious qualification. One may as well appoint the admirable Jonty Rhodes to the post of chief justice on the grounds that he is an outstanding fielder.
It should, therefore, come as little surprise to discover that the South African Breweries (SAB) chief, Meyer Kahn, has been unable to transform the police force despite his much-vaunted success in delivering beer to thirsty consumers. But, for all that, his announcement this week that he is standing down as CEO to the force when his contract expires in July comes as something of a shock.
The shock is not so much at his failure, but the sense of abandonment he leaves behind. His appointment, nearly two years ago, coincided with seemingly genuine efforts by private sector business to do something about the crime wave which has been bequeathed to the nation by the social inanities of apartheid. It was somehow fitting that the head of SAB should have taken something of a lead in that crusade, considering the example it had set in the pursuit of the cause of national reconciliation by means of its determinedly multi-racial advertising campaigns.
Now Kahn lets us know that he is not only leaving the force, but he is deserting South Africa altogether – expecting to be given a key position in the operation which SAB is opening in London.
The country’s business elite are engaging in something of a wholesale exodus to London at the moment, justifying it on the grounds that it is in South Africa’s interests that its major corporations are closer to the world’s financial hub. They seem to have gained the consent of our political masters with the argument that their departure will demonstrate the government’s acceptance of the mobility of capital.
To the man on the street a more likely explanation is that those who grew fat under apartheid rule are taking the chicken run and bending the government’s arm with the “foreign investment” bogey to do so in comfort. We do not criticise Kahn for his public confession that he is better suited to the organisation of the proverbial piss-ups in the breweries and we wish him well in his pursuit of such endeavours in the United Kingdom. But we would prefer it if he could refrain from pissing on our hopes for the future as he goes.
End of Zippergate
The United States’s long national nightmare is over. Those were the words Gerald Ford spoke the moment that Richard Nixon finally left the White House, bringing an end to Watergate. Now the US can say those words again thanks to the Senate, which last week wrapped up a show that has enthralled and appalled in equal measure for more than a year.
The national psychodrama of Zippergate, the tragicomedy of Bill and Monica, Linda and Ken, is finally at an end. Admittedly, independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr has threatened to carry on his pursuit of Bill Clinton, but the proper process is over. Now Americans have to peer into the crater left by the Zipper-bomb and ask what permanent scars it may have left on the national landscape.
The immediate impact is political. The attempted execution of Clinton turned out to be like the old cartoon of a circular firing squad: they missed the condemned man only to kill each other. The Republicans wound up as their own victims, their bodies strewn around Washington, while their would-be prey remained standing. Clinton is still president, while Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, is in premature retirement.
The Republicans’ poll rating is at its lowest since Watergate, while the 12 stern-faced men who prosecuted the Republican case in the Senate have taken their places alongside Saddam Hussein and the Unabomber as the most unpopular men in the US.
Their campaign against Clinton, widely perceived as a vendetta full of spite and hypocrisy, put them utterly out of step with the electorate – who made it clear from the earliest moment that they did not wish to see Clinton ousted. The memory of that deafness to national opinion could cost Republicans dear in next year’s elections, a fact that surely weighed in the minds of the clutch of Republicans in Democrat- leaning states who defied the party line to vote for Clinton’s acquittal.
There are other losers. The media, who consistently misjudged the mood of the country, are going to have to engage in some soul- searching. Clinton may have retained his knack for escaping disaster, but his relief must be tempered. The history books will still record him as the only elected president to be impeached – hardly the place in posterity he wanted. The year in which he might have built his political legacy has been squandered: it’s been all Lewinsky, all the time.
The only consistent hero in this tawdry tale are the American people themselves. They held their nerve throughout. They were able to distinguish between the president and the man, accepting one even as they acknowledged the flaws in the other. They were right, and now their will has been done.