What occurred outside the gates of Pollsmoor prison last week was to be expected. A few years ago, another dedicated swindler, as admired and coveted by his accomplices in the upper nestings of the African National Congress, was up in the same place, also displaying his arrogance to his gathered political brethren. He’d also emptied his own well-stocked pantry of lies and evasions. He’d also found himself about to begin a prison sentence. His malfeasance: stealing money from impoverished children to whose benefit he had dedicated his priestly self. When it comes to Christian hypocrisy, the Allan Boesak benchmark is hard to outdo.
Looking at the calibre and rankings of those hoisting Tony Yengeni shoulder-high into the clink — one well-wisher dispatched all the way to represent the president’s office — poor Boesak could be forgiven for feeling the sting of envy. In neither standing nor rank did he attract nearly as exalted a shoal of political pilot-fish as his fellow criminal.
Apart from not having the style to arrive for a jail term in a R700 000 vehicle, where Boesak also failed to come up to the ANC hierarchy’s established levels of obsessive self-admiration was in the speech he made before he walked through the Pollsmoor gates. When it came to self-pity and cheap bravado, Boesak’s pre-immolation speech was as grimly risible as Yengeni’s. But when it came to flatulent self-esteem, the Range Rover driver was in a different class.
Yengeni has often complained loudly how he’s been beaten and whipped by the media. At Pollsmoor he referred to his detractors thus: ”Now, the only thing I can say about them is that we should forgive them because I don’t think they know what they’re doing.” Wasn’t there some obscure second testament Jewish soothsayer who, having been savagely beaten and whipped, was nailed to a cross — but not of his own making — and who forgave his tormentors with something along those lines: ”Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do”?
Yengeni deserves our gratitude for evincing his own suffering as being comparable to that of the founder of the Christian religion. This went down particularly well with a small detachment of warders who danced with joy at the prospect of being butlers and bum-wipers to this pink stripe-shirted and designer-jeaned prophet.
It is said that, once inside, Yengeni was hosted to a special lunch in the Pollsmoor prison boardroom before being whisked off, still wearing his designer gear, in a private car all the way to the cruel hostelry of the Malmesbury prison: the very same lock-up where the hallowed Boesak spent his agreeable months as a convict, blessed with privileges, allowed his own cellphone, let out on weekend paroles, sent to give lectures, reportedly allowed to have food and drink sent in.
Having witnessed the moving display of leading-edge ubuntu outside Pollsmoor last week, can anyone believe that Yengeni’s imprisonment will be anything like punishment? You can hardly blame the doubters when they see the Speaker of the very Parliament Yengeni defrauded also there to add her blessings and comfort. What Yengeni undergoes in his ”incarceration” will be as comfortable as can be managed. After all, they don’t often have prisoners who are members of the national executive council.
The other certainty is that everyone will lie about this, if for no other reason than that mendacity in the government is becoming a stipulation, quintessentialised by the likes of Yengeni. If that’s not so, why were the Pahads and the Mbetes and the Rasools and all the rest of them there, flamboyantly expressing their sanction for fraud and corruption? Were the years of the ”struggle” endured, was all courage, the sacrifice and human loss suffered to these slimy ends?
Last week saw another, and as offensive a messiah impersonation as Yengeni’s. The appalling Adriaan Vlok, apparently having at last found the God whose moral edicts he so strenuously ignored when he was one of apartheid’s last and most malignant enforcers, came to apologise for the atrocities he used to prosecute with such enthusiasm. If he’d left it at that, it would have rested as yet another display of the late-flowering principle so popular among his fellows.
Instead, Vlok decided he’d outdo the Pik Bothas and FW de Klerks. Christ’s gesture in washing the feet of his disciples was one of humility and love. Unerringly, when he did the same, Vlok rendered unto this act all the obscenity of his diseased political breed. If, while he was the beloved progeny of a degenerate government, Vlok had ever been sent to jail for his murderous sins, I’ll say one thing for the Nats, obscene or not. They wouldn’t have turned up to cheer him, raise him on their shoulders, listen in awe to and applaud his profanities.
Unless Brett Kebble was involved, it’s easy to imagine who or what has being paying for all Yengeni’s legal pleadings. Never mind those, what about the full-page advertisements in the Sunday newspapers? Some level of politician to afford many millions in order to publish his lies. Perhaps the ANC stumped up for these, as a way of bragging post-natally about one of their most wretched mutations: the government-approved con artist.