Saved by the skin of its teeth, by jingo!

AS woe-begotten microlender African Bank confronts its own mortality, another venerable institution has been scrambling to avoid a similarly dire fate.

The Rand Club, squatting at 33 Loveday Street in central Johannesburg, has wined and dined South Africa’s gilded elite for 127 years. It was a refuge for everyone, from dusty Randlords to silvertongued, insalubrious crooks like Brett Kebble, who would lean against its Burmese teak and spin yarns at Africa’s longest bar while quaffing lager from Pewter mugs.

It’s been a reliable time warp to Victorian England since 1886, when Cecil John Rhodes drew to a halt at a random spot in the sweaty, newly forged mining town and declared: “This corner will do for a club.”

At the time, the site cost all of £72, members putting in £10 each.

With its metaphorical nose tilted skywards, the club still boasts that “one might be so bold as to say that the Rand Club is Johannesburg”.

The very fact that it maintains this conceit, even after corporate Johannesburg has largely strapped up its cummerbund, climbed into its Jaguar and beetled off to Sandton, speaks volumes.

But if African Bank hit its nadir because of its reluctance to deal decisively, and early enough, with its vulnerabilities, the Rand Club is taking no such risk.

In eight days, the Rand Club’s 1 200 members will meet to ratify perhaps the most radical overhaul of the club yet — essentially signing away the business, if not the four-storey building itself.

All of the Rand Club’s bars, conference and banquet business will be sold for the princely sum of R1 to game lodge operator Nanabi.

Nanabi will pay for water and electricity, the salaries of the kitchen staff, porters and security, and day-to-day repairs.

The Rand Club itself will still collect members’ fees, pay rates and the other salaries.

The second part of the deal is a “services agreement”, which will see another company called An African Anthology provide “management services” to the club.

David Williams, the Rand Club’s acting chairman, said this deal was really the only option, considering the club had been operating at a loss for more than a decade.

“The club isn’t dying, but it needed more revenue to extend itself. If we’d carried on doing what we did, we’d carry on doing functions and have a core membership, but there would be a steadily increasing gap between revenue and costs.”

It didn’t help that in 2012 the club discovered its bookkeeper had merrily swindled it out of cash for years — just when you thought the city was no longer simply a devilmay-care frontier town.

A forensic audit and many blushes later, the club is moving on.

Still, it remains an icon of the city, with considerable sway.

For example, back when he was a freshly retrenched nobody thanks to Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma first broke the news to the Rand Club’s “26 Club” that he had his eyes on the presidency. Other recent speakers include (gasp!) Julius Malema.

For the stuffiest members, the deal will be a shock. For one thing, its “main bar and main dining room will be open to the general public on a reservation-only basis”.

And while the “existing dress code will be relaxed in the main bar, the dress code will be maintained in the main dining room”.

Until now, it has been “not acceptable” to wear jeans, leather jackets or sports gear in the bar.

Given this scramble, it is ironic that the Rand Club once made its name by turning people away.

Afrikaners, women and black people were all barred at one stage — and it took two referendums before it was decided that the fairer sex could indeed share the spoils.

Little wonder The Economist described the Rand Club as a “fair testing-ground of South Africa’s shifting ethnic snobberies”.

But what makes it something of an in joke is that the Rand Club is so self-consciously snobbish.

Given the club’s toffee-nosed history, says Williams, “you have to have your tongue in your cheek a bit and treat it with a bit of irony”.

In 2010, the UK’s Guardian wrote that, despite the portrait of South Africa’s first democratic president which hangs in the club, “the Rand Club is probably the only place in South Africa where Nelson still means the hero of Trafalgar”.

“There is some corner of Johannesburg’s central business district that is forever England.”

Thanks to next week’s lifeline, odds are it will remain that way.