Hobby farm theft unreported to police and tax authorities returns to haunt Ramaphosa after 2024 election coalition shifts power.
Picture: Gallo Images/ER Lombard
It’s outrageous. You’re at your hobby farm in the country, just pottering around, so you stuff the $580 000 under the sofa cushions temporarily just to get it out of the way. Then you forget it when you are gathering things up to go back to the city. It could happen to anybody.
However, thieves break into your country home while you’re away and steal the money. You consider reporting it to the police, but know they are struggling to keep up with crime so you decide to forget about it. And even though it was foreign currency, you don’t report it to the tax authorities either because you never got to spend it. Or something like that.
But then events take a turn decidedly for the worse. A man called Arthur Fraser sends a dossier to the police reporting that you got the money and that it was not actually $580 000 but a whole $4 million. And since Fraser was the country’s former chief spy, they take him seriously and come to you looking for answers. What do you tell them?
This is the dilemma that President Cyril Ramaphosa faced in 2022 – and the rather far-fetched story above (with few notes about the money being the proceeds of a cash sale of some buffalos to a foreigner) was his explanation to the police. Miraculously, the police and his party believed him.
After the 2024 election, Ramaphosa remained in the Presidency, but the new government was a coalition in which some parties were willing to impeach him. It’s now a tag team match between parliament, the high court and the media, but he really could be impeached.
He’s not above the law. Perfect justice is not on the menu, but a rough facsimile of justice most of the time is good enough. There is even an international Rule of Law Index compiled by the World Justice Project that scores and ranks countries on how close they get to that rough facsimile, and it makes for interesting reading.
The four top countries are the four Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden, in that order. The four bottom countries are equally obvious: Haiti, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Venezuela.
New Zealand comes in at No 5 and most other developed English-speaking countries (Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom) cluster at 11, 13 and 14. But the US comes in at 27 – and South Africa ranks at 60.
This is specifically ranking countries on their adherence to the rule of law, measuring categories like absence of corruption and criminal justice. And a rival rule-of-law list by Freedom House produces almost identical rankings, except that it puts SA higher.
So would I. The violent crime rate is bad and the inequality of wealth is as bad as in Brazil or Russia. However, SA has managed to avoid most of the horrors that lay in wait for it after half a century of flat-out racist oppression.
That the courts managed to keep their independence through that decades-long siege was not just a miracle, it was the key factor in preserving enough of the democratic structures of the old whites-only rule to resurrect a multiracial democracy from the ruins of apartheid.
Of course, I would say that. My wife is South African and some of my best friends are South African lawyers.
