Swallow hard and be a patriot

ONCE upon a time, it was called indentured labour. Now it’s called patriotism.

This week, Justice Minister Ronald Lamola called on lawyers to do their “patriotic duty” by volunteering to be prosecutors in cases emanating from the Zondo Commission into State Capture.

Speaking at the Law Society’s annual general meeting, Lamola said lawyers in private practice should preferably do the work, which was so voluminous and exacting that the National Prosecuting Authority chief keeps telling us that it has been unable to bring a single prosecution in three years. He said they should do it free of charge or, at the very least, work at a reduced tariff.

Since I wasn’t present, I don’t know whether the lawyers fawned or fell about laughing. Some would have been immediately reminded of an admonishment by 18th century English man-of-letters, Samuel Johnson.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, goes the warning. That’s as true today as it was when it was said, almost 250 years ago.

Lamola’s appeal for lawyers to prove their patriotism by doing, for free, the public service’s heavy lifting is a relatively benign manifestation of political speciousness. But there are more worrying examples and, as the government grinds deeper into its own mire, this last-ditch ploy to get others to foot the bill is going to multiply.

And the legal community, the target of Lamola’s pleas, is not, itself, immune to hiding behind the patriotic fig leaf.

Earlier this month, a financial company trying to set up call centres in South Africa got short shrift in the Western Cape High Court. Mukuru, the now-global financial success launched in Cape Town 18 years ago, provides an online platform for African migrants to move their money safely and affordably to their families back home.

That means they need staff fluent in a variety of sub-Saharan African indigenous languages, preferably mother-tongue speakers, as Western Cape High Court Judge Daniel Thulare concedes in a muddled, sometimes embarrassingly contradictory judgment.

When one boils down the verbiage, Judge Thulare rejects Mukuru’s application because this private company was failing to shoulder the social responsibilities that, in any other country, fall on the State.

He accepted, said Judge Thulare, that it was “necessary for their business health” for Mukuru to have mothertongue speakers of indigenous languages spoken elsewhere on the continent. However, Mukuru had not “uttered a single syllable” about training South Africans “on proficiency in the languages which they deem to be so central to their existence and