Among the Wasp community last week’s presidential exoneration of the Extremely Reverend Allan Boesak has been received with a mixture of dismay and its subsidiary affection, Inverse Schadenfreude.
This latter is a feeling generated in the breasts of those who find little profit in the doings of others, but experience great pleasure whenever the others do something that underwrites the distrust. Inverse Schadenfreude is a pleasurable sensation, permeating you with the warmth that always comes with knowing that your scepticisms are being fortified.
Inverse Schadenfreude isn’t peculiar to South Africa. You’ll see it expressed in every anti-Blair editorial in the United Kingdom, a usually uncurbed elation at identifying and then dumping on the lies and dissimulation that these days decant from Downing Street. We all enjoy Inverse Schadenfreude in one way or another. Remember those stuffy lectures from daddy on the dangers of smoking, only to catch him having a furtive drag behind the garage? It’s that sort of feeling.
With the presidential wiping clean of the grimy Boesak slate first came the dismay that a man who, in the sacred name of the ”struggle”, stole money from coloured children dispossessed by the very apartheid that Boesak so audaciously decried in those cruel days when there weren’t oodles of donor money on offer. In effect he’s now been awarded a stamp of approval by President Thabo Mbeki, and so the dismay was soon mollified as Inverse Schadenfreude stepped in.
After all, we realised, it was only what was to be expected of an ANC administration, which on a regular basis demonstrates that it doesn’t actually give a blind stuff about fraud and corruption.
Every ANC politician or employee knows that the fine print in his or her liberation contract insists that as much public fuss as possible must be made about the horrors of corruption and fraud. But there’s not a sentence in there that says anything about comrades being expected to practise what they preach. There’s a limit to the elasticity of the rainbow.
At this stage of this column I wish to declare myself as being in active denial of my Wasp roots and branches. On the matter of the presidential pardon granted to the industrial-strength Christian charlatan and thief we once knew as Allan Boesak, I offer my forthright congratulations to Mbeki for this bright new product from the infinite parabola of his and his advisers’ intellects.
It has taken considerable effort to clamber over the hurdles of my prejudices, but now that I’ve done that, I see more clearly what Mbeki is about. It has been a humbling experience.
It must have taken much more in the way of effort, plus an extraordinary amount of sheer boldness for Mbeki to bring to realisation what the pardon of Boesak exemplifies: that the ANC now acknowledges it is prepared to forgive, if not approve of and encourage, corruption, duplicity, thievery, mendacity and all the other murky dispositions that are common to most contemporary political endeavour.
From George W Bush to Tony Blair, to Ariel Sharon to Yasser Arafat; from the political gluttony of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin to the subhuman enormities of North Korea’s communism; they all do their best to keep their chicanery, chiselling and plundering out of sight.
Not so the ANC today. To own up to one’s own venality, to make common cause of being politically rank and proud of it, is not only an act of rare courage, but one which shows that when it comes to transparency in the government, Mbeki’s administration is a shining example to all the world’s wannabe democracies. I can think of no government anywhere, in recent or distant history, that has come out quite so triumphantly in support of its core values.
It’s been coming for quite a time, indeed historians will record how not only Boesak received presidential pardon, but how a rash of other thieves and counterfeiters have been more quietly eased off the hook. What is auspicious is that Boesak’s absolution has been out in the harsh light of day, blatant, in our faces.
We can only hope that it is not long before others like it will follow. Think of the tedious and costly processes of delay and postponement, the legal costs, the extended bad publicity that has attended the current and unresolved Travelgate scandal. All this could have been disposed of with one whisk of the presidential fly-swatter.
Emboldened by the success of the Boesak pardon, Mbeki now has every reason to develop his forgiving temperaments. Witnesses to how he cocked a snook at the entire body of global scientific opinion on the matter of HIV/Aids, we may now again be proudly South African and acknowledge that our president has what can only be called the balls to be different.
And let us hear no more cavilling about poor Boesak’s readmission to the ANC’s Pantheon. His well-intentioned embezzling is far in the past. After the desperate years praying in the wilderness, a beckoning finger has called Boesak home. This parable of the prodigal hustler carries a lesson for us all.