26 Feb 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication: BDlive
Oscar Pistorius’s fall from
dizzying heights to the precipice of criminal infamy is a metaphor for our
national story, writes Tony Leon
THE late, great South African lawyer, Ernie Wentzel, had an arresting
turn of phrase. He opined in 1981 that the problem with being an advocate was
that "there are too many magistrates who think they are judges, and some
judges who ought to be magistrates".
As I was drawn into the Oscar Pistorius bail hearing, I couldn’t help
think that Wentzel’s observation had, happily for our international reputation,
been inverted, with the truly magisterial judgment of Desmond Nair in Pretoria
on Friday. For all the cruel light the shoddy forensic work of the former
investigating officer, Hilton Botha, had shone on the inadequacies of our
policing, along came the chief magistrate of Pretoria with a closely reasoned
and impeccably researched ruling to repair the battered image of our justice
system.
Of much lower media wattage, on the same day as Nair’s ruling, was the
decision of the Judicial Service Commission to exclude Jeremy Gauntlett from
the Constitutional Court short list yet again. Doubtless, Gauntlett can now reflect
on the observation about Oscar Wilde that he "would lose his best friend
for an epigram". His witty put-down of Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng along
the lines that, unlike the latter, he did not feel that God had called him to
judicial service, was not drawn from How to Win Friends and Influence People,
the Dale Carnegie bible on getting ahead. It was also strange that while
Gauntlett’s intellectual independence is unassailable, his "campaign"
for office roped in nominations from opposition leaders Helen Zille and
Mangosuthu Buthelezi. I can just imagine how uncomfortable some would have felt
had a nominee for judicial office included a nomination from, say, African
National Congress secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. Meanwhile, given some of
the strange appointments to our bench recently, and some of the more startling
omissions from it, Nair should be considered for an early elevation.
But all of this sits low in the cumulus clouds of national and
international attention. Pistorius alone inhabits the stratosphere — and the
world is drawn in, with voyeuristic fascination, at our home-grown combination
of the OJ Simpson trial and the death of Princess Diana. You also cannot but
contemplate, as Pistorius moved in less than a year from the pinnacle of Olympic
achievement to the pit of the Pretoria Magistrate’s Court, that lurking inside
his fall from a great and dizzying height to the precipice of criminal infamy
is, less dramatically as well, a sort of metaphor for our national story.
Last weekend, I completed a fellowship in the heady atmosphere of the
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, one of SA’s most impressive (and
most hidden) centres of thought excellence. Among a firmament of academic stars
in residence was Prof Bo Rothstein of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He
is an international expert on "the quality of governance" and its
baleful twin, corruption. He disarmingly put it: "I don’t have expertise
about the South African situation, but I can say that the quality of governance
and the absence of corruption in certain African countries are higher than it
is in countries like Greece and Italy."
He recounted at a seminar that a US student had expressed surprise that
a Scandinavian studying corruption was akin to a "nun running a strip
club". However, the observation he did offer about our national projection
abroad, a la the morphing of Pistorius from hero to zero, is that there has
been a steady depletion of SA’s moral capital in the world. He noted that, like
a successful corporation, if a country has prodigious amounts of what Harvard
professor Joseph Nye termed "soft power" — or the power of its
example rather than the hard stuff, such as the example of its power — then
"you should be careful not to diminish it". And we certainly have fallen
hard in recent times.
Rothstein has certainly not studied our National Development Plan (NDP)
and doubtless ministers Lindiwe Sisulu and Trevor Manuel, who last week
championed its key recommendation of creating (after 20 locust years) a
professional, corruption-free public service, are unaware of Rothstein’s
presence in SA. But the three of them are actually in agreement. And so is the
NDP.
Rothstein cites the example of that most life-essential delivery of all,
the provision of drinkable water. He notes: "A conservative estimate is
that 14,000 people die every day in the developing world from water- and
sanitation-related illnesses." Yet the shortage here is neither an absence
of engineering technical solutions, but rather corruption and "other forms
of bad governance".
Given that the Pistorius case sucked up most of the media oxygen,
President Jacob Zuma’s announcement that the NDP will now be front and centre
of all government policy-making received little attention. But if this wish
translates into real reforms, then we could climb slowly again up the summit of
achievement and admiration.
• Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA
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