The Law of Escalation -- knowing when the jig is up.

So I’m watching the news last night and I see that the case involving Pretoria High Court Judge Nkola Motata is still dragging on. What I found even more intriguing is when the newsreader mentions, in passing, that this whole mess emanates from an accident that occurred in January of last year. Okay, let me repeat that and allow it to marinate in your brain a little while longer.

Judge Motata is in the middle of a drink-tea-and-drive-and-crash case from an incident that happened in January of last year! This worries me more than it should — but it worries me nonetheless. Let me see if I’m getting it right:

1. In January of last year Judge Motata is chilling wherever judges hang out being his usual lordshippy self sipping on some special ‘tea’, his impressive brightly-coloured frock blowing in the wind.
2. Afterwards he gets into his Jaguar, his wig a tad askew I imagine, and drives home when a IFW (Identified Flying Wall) flings itself onto his path, crashing into him.
3. The usual suspects arrive on the scene, blood is extracted from his body and shows that some vindictive person (ostensibly an enemy of the bench) has intravenously injected inordinate amounts of alcohol into his blood.
4. Twenty months later (and lord-only-knows how many rand later) the tea connoisseur is sticking to his story and now questioning the evidence from the state laboratory. Let’s ignore that this is a bit like Dali Mpofu claiming that he was quoted out of context by an SABC reporter.

I guess I’m just wondering out loud when someone close to him will be brave enough to confront him with the news that the jig is up. But more importantly, I’m wondering why it is that so many public figures seem not to understand the Law of Escalation.

I have a friend whom I like to call Maswazi, mostly because that is his name. A mean-spirited son of a gun. One of his favourite rants is what he calls ‘the lack of people’s awareness that little things can escalate into a huge, unwieldy mess’. He always argues that the reason his life is uncluttered with too many complications is because he has the ability to nip things in the bud before they spiral out of control.

For instance, if Maswazi had had a wall jump in front of his car while he was driving home after an evening of tea consumption, I’m confident that he would have taken a very different course to that taken by Mo-tea-tea. You see, he would have acknowledged the moment at which blood was drawn from his veins as the critical ‘right royally fornicated with’ moment that it was. Time to put those hands up, lower the head sheepishly and go, ‘You got me, I’m sorry’.

I can guarantee that this whole thing would have long evaporated like flatulence inside a tornado by March of last year. By that time you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who remembered Motata’s name. By June, his name would only have been appearing in those sanctimonious DA/ID/UDM statements demanding an explanation for the ‘slap on the wrist’ sanction handed to him by his superiors. He’d be sitting at home right now sipping on Five Roses instead of worrying about cashing in the grandkids’ education policies to pay for what must be horrendous legal fees.

And it’s not just Motata. Bill Clinton did exactly the same thing. He was nearly ejected from the White House because he couldn’t just admit that he tripped on an Oval Office carpet and got his pecker inadvertently lodged inside the mouth of an intern who, at that very moment, was gasping at the enormity of his manhood.

In our own midst we also have Robert McBride whose actions, after yet another alleged drink-tea-and-drive-and-crash incident, have added ‘defeating the ends of justice’ and ‘fraud’ to his rap sheet. For what? Because he can’t face a little music for doing what every oke from Boksburg does on Friday night; dop-en-bestuur? Imagine if McBride had just pulled the ‘You got me, I’m sorry’ routine at the time. Imagine him appearing on TV with red, swollen eyes and apologising to the people of Ekurhuleni and South Africa for ‘my irresponsible behaviour and the breach of your trust’. He was, after all, driving home from a Christmas party. As unacceptable as it is to drive drunk, forgiving him would have been easy under the circumstances.

The heat would have been unbearable for a while. Because McBride loved to blow shit up as a young man, he has many enemies. They would have crawled out of the woodworks and demanded his head. It is even quite conceivable, albeit unlikely, that Mayor Nkosi would have fired him. We do, after all, have a unique democracy where firing the guy responsible for removing drunks off our streets is not guaranteed to lose his job for being drunk himself. But even if Nkosi had fired him at the time, McBride would have resurfaced elsewhere in the redeployment circus. This is our way. If you slap a secretary’s ass at Minerals and Energy, we redeploy you to Water Affairs. After all, nothing rehabilitates a serial rump-slapper like being shifted from oil to water.

I’ll tell you who the patron saint of the Law of Escalation is, though. St. Patrick ‘Terror’ Lekota. I always imagine him trotting along at a gentle 189 km/hour along the N1. He had attended a funeral earlier that day so I imagine that he would have been comfort snacking on a bucket of wings as he approached the Grasmere Toll Plaza. But when they nabbed him, he simply tucked his head between his shoulders, raised his arms and said, ‘You got me. I’m sorry’.

And this was not the first time he was caught offside. A few years back the referee cited him for an infringement on parliament for not declaring his interests in some fuel company and a wine cellar. Interests worth millions. You know the drill by now; head-tuck, arms in the air. Does anybody even remember this? Does anybody care?

Compare that to Tony Yengeni whose troubles started with a measly 47% discount on a freaking car amounting to R100k and some change. He allowed the whole messy business to escalate to the point where he was taking out full page adverts in Sunday papers and you just had to sit there, shake your head and wonder how it got this far. Fast forward a few years later and he’s in a prison cell asking a guard for permission to take a leak through a hole in very unflattering bright yellow overalls. Especially for one used to couture from Milan. Of course I’m oversimplifying matters to illustrate a point, but all for what? A discount on a freaking car?

Isn’t it time people took a leaf from Smuts Ngonyama? Smuts shut everybody up when a ‘scandal’ was brewing over his share in the Genesis-Telkom deal. That brutally honest ‘I did not struggle to be poor’ statement was the big, fat, middle finger that nipped the escalation in the bud. I may not agree with the sentiment but you can’t fault a guy who says ‘I did it, deal with it’.

It’s the kind of thing that the dark force of nature that is Maswazi would have said.

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