Shaik’s trial has inspired a song and a pasta dish and set SA abuzz ­ but given contradictory pictures of the man

The other Shaik is the one contained within his not-guilty plea to the court. This Shaik is a loyal comrade and friend, a far cry from the state’s manipulative bully

Corruption accused Schabir Shaik was immortalised in song last Sunday by Durban band The Burlesque Supergroup.

The song, Fat Cats in Parliament, was written by Supergroup frontman Richard Walne and performed a week ago at the city’s BAT Centre. It deals with the political demise of former African National Congress chief whip Tony Yengeni, with the chorus dedicated to Shaik.

It goes like this:

“Fat cats in Parliament

In trouble all over again

But it doesn’t matter as long as you’re in with

Another fat cat who knows your name

So come on ­ get it right! Shaik a leg ­ Shaik, Shaik it tight!

Don’t be a fool ­ even if you are.”

Two of Shaik’s minders, Adrian Ash and Costas Dranias, were at the concert.

Both, however, were spared the indignity of hearing their pal maligned in song after having listened to a similar tune in court on a daily basis. They left just as the Supergroup were busy with their sound check.

The song went down well with the BAT audience, but an earlier performance at the Hilton Hotel’s Rivets Bar ­ one of Shaik’s hangouts frequented by Durban’s new bourgeoisie ­ saw Supergroup being booed.

The song reflects how Shaik has become an unmistakable part of Durban’s political, social and economic culture.

For the past two months, Shaik’s face has dominated newspaper front pages and television bulletins, only being bumped off by George W Bush’s victory in the US elections.

Shaik’s notoriety manifests itself in many ways. That caricature of the nouveau riche, the television image of Shaik puffing an obscenely large cigar while dangling his toes in his Khoi pond, will probably never go away.

Ditto the images of him arriving at court in a black 7-series BMW with his hefty, black-suited minders, all but one of them white.

The same goes for Shaik the golf-mad former caddy who plays off a six handicap and constantly offers Scorpions spokesman Sipho Ngwema 18 holes at his favourite Durban course. A local trendy trattoria, Spiga D’Oro, has named a dish ­ linguine a la Shaik ­ after the Nkobi Group boss because of his insistence on ordering off-menu.

Discussions, from dinner tables to taxi seats, are dominated by Shaik: whether he will go to jail and what price Deputy President Jacob Zuma will pay for his relationship with the former assistant to ANC treasurer-general Thomas Titus Nkobi.

Handfuls of supporters put in an appearance outside and inside court. So, too, do many of his local enemies.

Shaik was once known as “Scabies” by Durban ANC activists resentful of his level of influence, as a relative newcomer to the movement, in the 1990s.

The ANC KwaZulu-Natal leadership ­ whose provincial office is about 100m from the court ­ are conspicuous by their absence.

Had they been there they would have witnessed Tuesday’s incident in which Shaik allegedly verbally abused and threatened a policeman in a parking dispute.

Had they been at Zita Bar, an upmarket lounge in Florida Road last Friday night, they would also have seen Shaik holding court at the risqué lingerie show he attended with his entourage.

But who is Schabir Shaik, whose dealings have become a one-man political soap opera?

Shaik was born in Alpine Road, described by his spin doctor, Dominic Ntsele as a “low-income South Indian area” on 10 December 1956. He was known by the family nickname of “Pity”. The name stems from the fact that his Afrikaner maternal grandparents wanted him to live with them, but his father, businessman and unionist Lambie Rassool, refused.

“As a result, both sides believed it was a ‘pity’ that he was caught in the middle, and the name stuck,” says Ntsele.

After attending Springfield Hindu Primary School, Shaik moved on to the Gandhi Desai Secondary School near Durban’s Warwick Triangle. His family moved from Alpine Road to Greenwood Park, where his elder brothers, Mo and Yunus, became politically involved in the Natal Indian Congress and, later, in ANC underground structures.

Shaik studied electrical engineering at the ML Sultan Technikon, unlike his more militant brothers, who cut their political and academic teeth at the University of Durban-Westville.

After graduating with a master’s in electrical engineering, Shaik worked for Sasol and at the Koeberg power station before becoming a lecturer in industrial instrumentation and process control at the Peninsula Technikon’s Department of Electrical Engineering. He married Zuleika Vahed, whose family owns Kingsgate Clothing, South Africa’s biggest privately owned clothing concern, which employs around 10 000 people, 15 years ago. The couple have no children.

That, at least, is the uncontested Schabir Shaik story.

In Durban’s High Court ­ an institution heavy on detail but sparse on emotion ­- there are two versions of Shaik being presented to Judge Hillary Squires.

According to the state and its witnesses, Shaik is a manipulative, money-obsessed, bullying, name-dropping, foul-mouthed braggart who played shell games with companies he created to milk his association with struggle icons like Jacob Zuma and Nkobi. Witness Themba Sono described Shaik as an exponent of “crony capitalism”, a man not above employing black faces to get contracts when his own face was not black enough.

Bianca Singh, Shaik’s former secretary, told of a vulgar bully obsessed with controlling every cent in Zuma’s bank account.

It was also Singh who spoke of leaving Nkobi because of Shaik’s coarse treatment of her and other staffers, only to return because colleagues told her he had re-discovered Islam and become “holy”.

She also spoke of an “incident of a personal nature” in Shaik’s bungalow at a Mauritius hotel where they were staying for a meeting with arms dealer Thomsons (now Thint). Shaik eventually paid her R40 000 to settle the matter.

Then came the state’s KPMG report, delivered by forensic auditor Johan van der Walt, which uses thousands of documents seized in a raid on Nkobi to reconstruct a picture of seven years of Shaik’s business dealings.

Here the shell-game scenario takes shape, with Shaik setting up “special purpose vehicles” which only became active when money was received from government contracts Nkobi had bid for.

This evidence painted a picture of a belligerent, aggressive Shaik in the business world: using Zuma to try to muscle out other black economic empowerment (BEE) consortiums headed by heavyweights like former army boss Lambert Moloi and Mzi Khumalo in several multimillion-rand deals.

It also tells of a Shaik fighting to assert both his own blackness and his empowerment credentials.

The KPMG report also describes a Shaik quite willing to live on overdraft, using Kobifin to raise money from the banks to keep himself, his other companies and Zuma afloat.

The other Shaik is the one contained within his not-guilty plea to the court. This Shaik, who will only be fleshed out when defence witnesses are called and if the man himself takes the stand, is a far cry from the state’s manipulative bully.

This Shaik is a loyal comrade, brother and friend, who abandoned a lucrative lecturing post in the late 1980s to return home and help the family after his brothers were detained by security police and his father suffered a stroke.

This is the Shaik who left South Africa on a false passport to become a courier for the ANC leadership, “tasked” with setting up channels to move “vast amounts” of ANC money into the country to “underground structures”.

This Shaik became close friends with Zuma, whom he had “regularly met and briefed” in London.

This Shaik paid more than R1,2-million to Zuma and his creditors in a bid to keep the deputy president, who was contemplating quitting politics because of his spiraling debt, in office.

Ultimately, it will be up to Judge Squires to rule on the deeds of either Shaik the devout cadre-turned-businessman for whom Squires closes court on Fridays so that prayers may be observed, or Shaik the money-grabbing name-dropper presented by Billy Downer and the rest of the prosecution team.

PITY, THE MAN: A family dispute landed Schabir Shaik with the nickname ‘Pity’ as a child. The country now knows him as either an arrogant braggart or a kindly comrade ... or both Pictures: RICHARD SHOREY

With acknowledgements to Paddy Harper and the Sunday Times.

* Schabir Shaikh has no master's degree in engineering. He probably doesn't have a "master's" diploma in engineering. He may not even have any diploma in engineering because when the Peninsula Technikon did an audit on their lecturers formal qualifications, Schabir did a duck and hastily resigned fro his position.

It is also difficult to think of a low-level technikon lecturer's emoluments as "lucrative".

Schabir Shaikh tried to rape Bianca Singh in his bungalow at the La Pirogue Hotel in Mauritius in October 2000.