Up to the media to look beyond the Selebi sideshow

South Africa is well rid of former police national commissioner Jackie Selebi, sentenced to 15 years for corruption. Corruption is indeed, in the words of Judge Meyer Joffe, “sabotage of the country’s prosperity and … democracy”, but Selebi’s malfeasance is actually only a symptom of a bigger problem.

Selebi has been neutralised for now — depending on a possible appeal or even a pardon after what the African National Congress feels is a decent interval — but the cancer he epitomises started in the highest echelons of government. In that respect nothing is likely to change, for what matters most to the ANC is not how corrupt a comrade is but whether he or she is loyal.

The Selebi strain of the disease tracks back to former president Thabo Mbeki. He had ample warning of Selebi’s corruption but did everything possible to protect his close ally.

It was Mbeki who implored a delegation of religious leaders to “trust me” when they wanted a judicial inquiry into Selebi’s criminal connections. It was Mbeki who fired the prosecutions head Vusi Pikoli for daring to arrest Selebi.

Another part of the problem was the inability of police top brass to separate self-interest and their loyalty to Selebi from their law enforcement duties. Instead some connived to stymie the Scorpion investigation into Selebi and vied in issuing simpering endorsements of their boss.

Then there was Interpol, which when Selebi’s mobster connections became public currency should have insisted quietly that he stand down as president of the international police agency until the matter was resolved. Instead they sycophantically defended him as “a man of the highest professionalism and integrity”, an “honourable and dedicated public servant” who provided “honest, upright, and strong leadership”.

This of a man who brazenly defended his friendship with known international drug smuggler, Glenn Agliotti. A man who was also leaking British police intelligence on Agliotti’s drug smuggling to his criminal pal.

Interpol did not even mind that Selebi was a cheat, pocketing close on a quarter of a million rand from both Interpol and the SA Police Service for the same expenses. Interpol’s chief financial officer testified in Selebi’s defence that the agency didn’t have a problem with such “double-dipping”.

Given that Selebi was cocooned in layers of influential support, it is remarkable that he was brought to justice. It was the determination of unjustly axed airports’ chief Paul O’Sullivan, whose drip-feed of details regarding Selebi’s criminal activity eventually became impossible to ignore.

O’Sullivan was the driver but it was the media that was the vehicle. Without corroborating evidence dug up by reporters and a steady flow of new revelations, especially by the Mail & Guardian‘s investigative team, O’Sullivan’s claims would have petered out, especially in a country where there is a new corruption scandal every week.

It’s also worth noting that should the ANC’s new raft of planned media laws have been in operation four years ago, there are at least a dozen journalists who now would be sitting in jail, no doubt much to minister Blade Nzimande’s pleasure.

Selebi himself would have been sitting pretty and the web of mobster subversion of the SAPS spreading insidiously. How helpful, too, it would have been for the international drug cartels to have their own man in the Interpol top job.

Selebi may, for all we know, be just a sideshow. No one knows how deep and far the corruption in SAPS’s top hierarchy extends.

The judicial inquiry that SA’s religious leaders wanted might help us find out but can you really see the ANC going that route? So, as usual, it’s up to the journos, at least until the ANC muzzles them.