McBride’s battle

I don’t like convicted bombers. It’s probably because I grew up in Northern Ireland, but Robert McBride’s fight to be reappointed as head of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (Ipid) is of interest.

Robert McBride was, as the IRA would say, “on active service” and spent time on death row for deeds committed on Umkhonto weSizwe orders. He probably wouldn’t be around today were it not that he had the same name as the Boer war hero who gave his name to MacBride’s Brigade.

This MacBride was shot by British forces after Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916, but not before conceiving Sean MacBride, who went on to chair Amnesty International, as well as winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the early 1970s.

Sean’s mother was the embodied goddess of Irish nationalism, Maud Gonne, who almost drove WB Yeats mad. These irrelevancies, ably presented to the Irish government, were then used by it to apply diplomatic pressure on Pretoria to keep Robert from taking a high jump.

Although his subsequent career has been chequered, I sense that McBride’s tenacious legal battle with the minister of police stems not from potential lost income, but from a sense of betrayal: he didn’t sit on death row to allow senior officers access to slush funds for nefarious purposes while constables are butchered in SA’s streets.

A possible solution would be for the police to make the documentation on the R45m “grabber” procurement contract, allegedly earmarked to buy votes at the ANC conference at Nasrec in 2017, available to McBride and two judges. If it contains no smoking guns, McBride should depart to the quiet life of revolutionary reunions.

If smoking guns are uncovered, then he would be reappointed as head of Ipid.

James Cunningham Camps Bay