As much as it irks one to admit it, Percy Sonn got it absolutely right. Hansie Cronje should immediately be returned to full participation in not only cricketing but its associated gambling activities as well. We can only hope the United Cricket Board (UCB) can crank up enough fortitude to reinstate poor Hansie before it’s too late and he decides to sink his
considerable gifts into some other suitable calling – aren’t they looking for someone to beef up quality control at the Bloemfontein sewage farm?
The reason Hansie Cronje should be allowed to practise his earlier professions is that he’s now paid his criminal dues. Along with many others already enjoying the hard-earned fruits of their larcenies, Hansie deserves to be allowed to get on with his next scam undisturbed. Fabulous amounts of public money were spent on trying to prove him guiltless of mendacity and double-dealing. The UCB took no notice and ratified Hansie’s permanent suspension. Hansie then had to spend long bucks from his personal lootings trying to have himself reinstated in a real court as opposed to a play-play one. Still no luck. Surely the time has come to forgive and forget, to sit back and let Hansie Cronje take his rightful place in cricketing affairs? There are hundreds of matches still to be fixed.
That’s what Percy Sonn was really saying with his plea about Hansie Cronje being let off his leash. He was, as they say, sending a strong message: get real. What difference is one more swindler going to make? Better still, a deeply Christian swindler.
Not entirely by mistake, Percy Sonn’s call coincided nicely with the 90th anniversary celebrations of the AfricanNationalCongress, for, in a sense, Percy was also paying oblique tribute to the ANC’s courageous recognition and employment of criminal disciplines in the furtherance of its own causes. Any week of South African newspapers and e.tv reveals an ANC bureaucracy contributing a reliable stream of corruption and self-righteous justification for it. It’s Hansie on sticks in there.
In both blessing and formalising this crimino-political engagement the ANC has been very impressive. Over the eight years it has held office the organisation has well earned the cheerful reinterpretation of its initials as the Association of Nepotists and Cronyism – a worthy boss on the shield of 90 years of proud democratic endeavour.
When it comes to blame-free hustling the ANC has not had to look very far for recruits. The exposure in the media of some trusted ANC functionary with his or her fingers deep in the till has become quotidian. Such exposure is followed invariably by a ritualised process of shrill denials, cries of racism, token investigations by ANC-loaded parliamentary committees or clandestine internal fora. Next is the “sub judice limbo period”, its duration dictated by the seriousness of the original charge. The harsher the fraud, the shorter the time out in the cold.
After the window-dressing comes the reward phase: the dropping of all charges for lack of evidence and the appointment of the accused functionary to some higher office. If it’s a former defence minister, he gets a Star of Africa thrown in.
So anxious is the ANC’s need to absolve, it extends beyond the merely criminal. What better example of a dip in the sewer than the ANC’s willingness to overlook the whole overrated naughtiness of apartheid and welcome into its ranks Marthinus van Schalkwyk and his array of New National Party putrids? What an elegant way to celebrate 90 years of the “struggle” – the equivalent of the Israeli government absorbing the residue of the Nazi Youth.
Look around to see how dutifully the ANC’s lead is being followed. Only last week was it announced that Mr Ben Keiser, a central figure in the Cape Town street-renaming debacle, has been reinstated in his position as mayoral legal adviser. It is rumoured he’s been given a fat pay hike in appreciation of his quaint remark about how the Cape Town public “could go and fuck themselves”. Just about everybody involved in that inglorious scam has been rewarded. That paragon of good taste and style, Peter Marais, got kicked all the way to the top.
Once you accept that under ANC guidance South Africa is becoming a bewildering wonderworld where even the most nominal of moral codes are inverted, it becomes easy to understand why the Mbeki oligarchy does nothing much more than shrug sympathetically about the immaculate lunatic to our immediate north. The reason Mbeki and the Southern African Development Community don’t do anything about Comrade Bob is that privately they gloat over what he’s doing. Having a gifted Idi Amin impersonator right next door keeps the spotlight off your own cesspool.
From Sarafina through Virodene, from McBride to Modise to Alan Boesak being greeted rapturously by senior ANC figures as he emerges from prison. In a crowded waiting room the Shaik brothers try to comfort poor Tony: “Be patient. Our turn will come.”
That’s all Percy Sonn was trying to say: somewhere there’s got to be a place for Hansie.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby