IF THERE is ever an award for achieving the exact opposite of what you set out to do, then National Director of Public Prosecutions Shaun Abrahams would win it hands down.
He called a hasty press conference on Tuesday, just after Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan was served with a summons to face fraud charges, to protest that this was not politically motivated but proof of the National Prosecuting Authority's independence.
It was a performance that bordered on the burlesque, but in truth was just grotesque.
The true crime is the pursuit of vendettas, using state resources to shut up the few voices of reason that remain, terrifying international investors who flee, causing the currency to depreciate and the cost of living to spiral up.
Gordhan will be charged with two of his most senior lieutenants, Oupa Magashula and Ivan Pillay, over the approval of Pillay’s early retirement package. It's a ludicrous situation, all the more so given how commonplace and accepted the practice of early retirements and then being rehired is in the commercial sector – and therefore not a crime at all. The whole proposition, though, becomes wholly untenable for the NPA when you consider the lengths to which Gordhan, as a serving minister in the cabinet, has gone to work with investigators and answer the NPA’s questions.
He has not employed any kind of “Stalingrad defence” to legally avoid any possible criminal action – unlike the president, who remains uncharged despite the raft of court decisions declaring the NPA’s decision to drop 783 fraud and corruption charges against him irrational and inexplicable.
It is Gordhan, though, who will be in the dock.
The elephant will still be in the room, but the foreign investors won't be. As society divides into those for the president and those for the finance minister, the problem is the price that will be exacted.
This is not a vaudeville sideshow, where we can be titillated bystanders; we are unwilling participants who will be forced to pay – even more than we already have.