&7 %5 7 8 9 9 4 :

I’VE recently learned the hard way about winning an argument and losing a friend.

Like any above-average intelligent human being, I relish a good-old debate.

I held the forte with a motley crew as drinks flowed, explaining why abaThembu King Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo should not be incarcerated.

My opponents lapped up my argument that Africa always had her ways to resolve disputes, which did not include imprisonment.

The weed-puffing king was right that he was a judicial officer in his own right and according to tribal authority and therefore Roman Dutch law had no place to put him in the dock.

It was time Africans went back to the indigenous systems that regulated communal life before Jan Van Riebeeck sailed in at the Cape of Good Hope.

It was time this democratic government went back to the lekgotla system and shed the colonial legacy. A lekgotla was the only place where Dalindyebo could get justice for his misdemeanours.

The current legal system of precedence spelt trouble for hundreds of other tribal authorities dotted in this country.

For instance, any subject fined a cow by his chief could easily resort to the courts and accuse the royal of livestock theft. I was on a roll. It was time we unshackled ourselves from colonial oppression. The same applies to the economy. This government maintained the status quo inherited in 1994; a different jockey flogging the same horse.

I awarded myself a gold medal in Dalindyebo-ism when the tipplers drunkenly agreed that Africans indeed get a raw deal from the lack of transformation of the judiciary, the economy and the education systems that still reflect their colonial origins.

A week later, I got a call in the wee hours from a member of my coterie from the previous week; the one who had listened attentively and made little input.

He was with another crew where he had initiated the same argument and borrowed heavily from my stupor-induced factuality.

I discerned that he was having a torrid time converting his crowd, hence he decided he needed Prof Vusi s back-up.

He volunteered to put me on speaker phone and let his counters benefit from my brilliant vicissitudes. Before he could, I asked him whether he was familiar with second chapter on the Bill of Rights. Pause. I told him it was important to fortify his cranium with knowledge from the books before he woke me up instead of snippeting my arguments.

For the record, I said, the abaThembu King was not above the law.

He went silent before meekly asking me to repeat myself on the Roman Dutch Law versus the lekgotla. The guts of some people!

I smiled like Dracula before I stabbed him between the metaphoric ribs with this punchline: Until that happens, we are all at the mercy of the robed judges.”

I haven’t heard from him again.