The author Frederick Forsythe observed recently that if a train driver made a grievous error that cost lives, he would not walk away grinning. If an airline pilot did the same he’d probably never fly again. If the driver of a train fell asleep and caused a smash he’d end up in jail.
Forsyth was referring to the recent findings of the Butler inquiry in England and which attributed as “collective” the guilt for doctoring the security intelligence that led to Britain going to war in Iraq. With his findings, said Forsythe, Lord Butler had created a new breed of men and women, living under a new law code. Politicians and their mandarins can never, at any time, be held responsible for anything.
Forsythe is a bit off course in this last comment. There is nothing new about political immunity from penalty. When a politico steals or lies too blatantly, the worst that usually happens is a carefully stage-managed investigation, followed by some sort of imaginative exculpation. As a genus, politicians operate above common law and morality. As long as anyone can remember, they’ve danced to their own music, submitted to only those restrictions and principles that suit their purposes. Ask the KwaZulu-Natal Director of Public Prosecutions if she thinks she has to pay enormous speeding fines like the people she punishes for the same offences.
Which is why I write this column, as a brief advisory to any young South Africans still unsure of what career or pursuit to follow in our equally young democracy. Take to politics is the advice I offer in all sincerity. There are few careers that will tender such exciting prospects to the young and eager: money, position, power and, to cap it all, naught but the faintest danger that they will ever be called to account as they perjure, swindle and preen their way through life. It is not being a politician that’s a mug’s game.
Before taking the plunge, young folk should ponder on the steeply spiralled firmament they will be entering if they decide to become politicians — or even one of the covetous brood of parasites that live off droppings from politicians’ financial orgies. The young should begin by accepting some apparent contradictions. Prime among these is that the style and mechanisms of politics in South Africa are part of the despicable residue of colonialism — something we are otherwise committed to obliterating. Vast screeds of so-called European cultural values and misunderstandings came with the colonisers. Not only did they steal everything that wasn’t securely lashed down, they imposed their crude and inapposite tongues on the innocent and trusting. We all know about the horrors.
Today all that has changed. The power and the greed, the dishonesty and immorality that were so jealously nourished and guarded over more than 300 years by the colonialist invaders, have been taken from them, slightly adapted and put to far better use. But any young person considering a life in South African politics should remember that he or she will, for the meantime anyway, often have to accept as necessary certain window-dressings of the colonialist tradition. Watch the next opening of Parliament and take note as they heave that luminous mace into the House. Watch Madam Speaker. She might be wearing a humongous day-glo orange hat that looks like the inverted base for a garden umbrella, but listen to the archaic Westminster phraseology she uses, and realise that our new masters and mistresses acknowledge that, as vicious and boundlessly vile as they were, the colonialists knew how to dress the hyena in buttons and bows.
But these imposed values and creeds are only temporary. Once apartheid’s special pejorative, Non-European has mutated into an emblem of triumph: not-European — a chasm of difference in two consonants. Everything is transient — even beauty it would seem. If you don’t believe that, go and take a look at the heap of wind-blown plastic and rubble that is Brenda Fassie’s grave now that the cameras and high-profile mourners have departed.
Getting back to Forsythe and his charitable opinion that penalty-exempt politicians are of recent evolution. Come to current South Africa, Frederick, if you want to see how the right sort of politicians are immune from legal restraint. Be amazed not only at how they float above all the restrictions and probity expected of ordinary citizens, but how they’re encouraged to be arrogant at the same time. They are anything but a recently discovered species.
In South Africa you can be the holder of the second highest political office in the land, but woe betide any legal functionary who tries to bring you or your cohorts to book for what would have Joe Citizen in the dock in a minute. In Mpumalanga you can rob the health budget blind and all they’ll do is promote you. As a South African diplomat you can plunge your grubby hands into the underwear of your female consular staff and the minister of foreign affairs will come running to defend your right to do so.
So don’t be ordinary and dull. Take up politics, young people. It’s very slippery in there, but the bonanza isn’t going to last forever.