Shun corruption regardless of race
DEAR SIR — Roger Jardine (pictured) has put on the table the issue of deep, protracted corruption, not as election point scoring, but asking why and how it has become part of national culture.
Some years after we became a democracy, publishers fired a black woman editor and a white columnist for serial plagiarism. No one defended the black editor. But there was a stream of “ag shame” letters to editors about that white columnist.
Around the same time two cricketers were punished for match-fixing. No one defended the coloured cricketer. But there was a stream of “ag shame” letters pleading for the white cricketer. The same applied four decades ago when a white gang led by a rogue cop robbed banks. A pop singer romanticised the criminal cop as a folk hero.
This record of public response shows how the dominant corruption narrative frames it as something done by the “other” — black not white, politician not businessman, African National Congress voter not Democratic Alliance voter. When Englishspeaking, white entrepreneurs are convicted of collusion/corruption, our culture treats this as a one-day headline, not to be mentioned again.
We are dealing with a toxic mix of racial solidarity, political party preferences and ideological bias with a history of generations. Mr Jardine dis- covered the construction cartel had been organised since 1972, when he was nine years old. A decade before that, how many South Africans of all colours and classes were bragging about something they bought cheap that “fell off the back of a lorry”?
Their “nudge-wink” showed they knew it had been stolen from an employer or warehouse. In the UK, the occupation of fence is considered more dangerous than that of housebreaker, because the risk is higher. In SA, there is no need for fences, because the majority of South Africans of all colours see nothing wrong with buying stolen goods.
Corruption will only fall significantly when we denounce and report the corrupt regardless of whether they are black or white, politician or businessman, and regardless of which party they voted for. Ivory is not the only stolen goods with invisible blood on it. And sooner or later, it will be blood from someone you knew.
Keith Gottschalk
Claremont