CHARMAIN NAIDOO: When the rule of law goes, anything goes

EXTRACT I was in a hurry and so, as I roared down Central Road in Houghton, failed to see the traffic cops trapping for speed with what today would be a primitive pointy thing that apparently registered how fast you were going. A handlebar moustache swathed in khaki stepped out from behind a bush and held up his hand. I screeched to a halt. The process of the negotiation began. Did I know I was doing nearly 80 – 77.4kms/hour maam to be exact – in a 60km zone. I didn’t know that, but I was terribly sorry officer. I needed to get to the art school, he was determined to draw out the process. In the end, I dipped into my handbag, whipped out the R100 he’d been waiting for and handed it over – for a few beers over the weekend I said. He waved me off. I was 15 minutes late. I’ve never forgotten that bribe. It has always made me feel small and ashamed. Completely ashamed.

My father’s most terrifying stories always began with Once Upon A Time. He’d teasingly insist that they were “cross my heart and hope to die” true.

Since that was the oath preferred by schoolgirls, (I was a schoolgirl), and steeped in the religious significance of the cross – coupled with my father’s staunch Catholicism – I trusted the veracity of the tales of terror.

They always had a didactic theme. Lessons, my father believed, like Jesus before him, should be told and learnt through parables.

There were a number of subjects: the inherent dangers of not telling the truth to the mortal sin caused by theft.

At the end of the “always tell the truth” story Lying Lily gets dangled over the edge of a cliff. From the bottomless pit below came a stinky, smoky sulphuric gas. Fire and brimstone Dad would say.

In the end, my Dad always allowed for some sort of redemption. Lying Lily repents and is, of course, rescued by an angel and flown to safety.

Light fingered Lily didn’t fare so well. She had to return the goods and face the humiliation of having to apologise to the entire congregation at Sunday mass.

Some stories, apocryphal no doubt, had a basis in truth. As a grown up I can now see who the chief protagonists were; what their sin and why they irked my dad’s sense of fairness.

To this day, I shiver when I think of Vexatious Vish.

Dad painted a picture of Vsquared as the devil incarnate, a man with horns and a forked tongue.

Vexatious Vish’s split-in-two tongue darted out of his little mouth, this way then that. Never still, that tongue smelled out trouble.

Of course, my teacher Dad couldn’t help using the moment to impart wisdom, using this chance to teach us something. Snakes have forked tongues and they use the tips of them to smell, something they do better than they see he’d say.

VV was notorious for gossip, for saying one thing and then doing the opposite. Devious.

Talking with forked tongue, Dad thought, was the worst kind of sin because it undermined every moral principle, threw away any form of sincerity, made a mockery of any attempt at ethical thought.

If you can’t trust someone to mean what they say, to stand true to what they believe, then what’s the point of it all?

I’ve always taken it to mean that your words have to match your actions - which is why I will always remember November 21st  1996 as a low point in my life.

I’d offered to fetch a friend’s son from his art class in Norwood. He was an anxious child, a little OCD, a little skittish. He was quick to worry and I said I’d fetch him at 4.30 and it was close to that when I left the office.

I was in a hurry and so, as I roared down Central Road in Houghton, failed to see the traffic cops trapping for speed with what today would be a primitive pointy thing that apparently registered how fast you were going. A handlebar moustache swathed in khaki stepped out from behind a bush and held up his hand.

I screeched to a halt. The process of the negotiation began. Did I know I was doing nearly 80 – 77.4kms/hour maam to be exact – in a 60km zone. I didn’t know that, but I was terribly sorry officer.

I needed to get to the art school, he was determined to draw out the process. In the end, I dipped into my handbag, whipped out the R100 he’d been waiting for and handed it over – for a few beers over the weekend I said.

He waved me off. I was 15 minutes late.

I’ve never forgotten that bribe. It has always made me feel small and ashamed. Completely ashamed.

I believe absolutely that corruption is to be condemned and rooted out at every turn. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in civic duty.

I bribed an officer of the law, and in so doing behaved in exactly the same way that I viewed as repugnant when I saw it being done around me. It was a hard lesson.

There have been occasions when, after some traffic incident, it would have been easier to fork out a few hundred rand than going through the hassle of the paying of fines. I’ve not been tempted. The memory of my 1996 shame is still fresh.

Like my father used to say, your words, your belief system and your actions have to match.

It’s something we have trouble with as South Africans.

We find State Capture shocking. We want the Guptas caught and thrown in jail. We think that Jacob Zuma is dishonest and that he should spend the rest of his days behind bars. We deplore corruption and (people say) if it was up to us, those scoundrels who’ve been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, or who have given jobs and favours to pals should be brought to book.

And yet we’re prepared to pay bribes to traffic cop, or to the driving inspector testing your child for a drivers licence.

I wonder if Jesse Duarte feels any shame.

The ANC deputy secretary general was vehement in her defence of convicted criminal Tony Yengeni this week, jailed for fraud in 2003 for negotiating a 47% discount on a Mercedes SUV.

He got four years jail but served only four months.

Here was Duarte’s assertion: Everyone negotiates discount deals. That’s not corruption. The conviction of Comrade Tony worried her, she said.

This man, with a dodgy past (including drunk driving and accusations of bribery that go way back to 1995) has been appointed as the chairman of a working group on crime and corruption.

Talk about foxes and hen houses.

A university friend who has lived in Germany for the last 35 years expressed surprise on how loose our understanding of the law is.

Her examples were that we don’t wear seatbelts if we don’t have beeping cars that insist you do; we walk across busy streets rather than use the pedestrian crossing; we litter, we carry children on our laps in a car; we don’t pick up after our dogs in the park… We flagrantly flout the law.

I’m adding to that list: we protect criminals who have been found guilty of breaking the law. We are also, it would seem, comfortable with venality for ourselves, yet are hugely critical of corruption and political theft on a grand scale.

We’re a confused nation.