Not surprisingly, deputy president Jacob Zuma's diehard supporters have rallied to his defence in spite of the damning findings in the Schabir Shaik trial judgment.

Most vocal of these has been the ANC Youth League. Its defence of Zuma, however, is exceptionally thin. It exhorts his critics to lay off until he has had his day in court, attacks the National Prosecuting Authority for "irresponsible insinuations" and has a go at the media in general for what it regards as inappropriate comment on the case.

The Youth League appears to disregard the rather pertinent fact that we are talking about the deputy president of the country here. The damage already done to his reputation -- and by extension to his office - is so serious that South Africans cannot simply stand by and ignore the findings of the court.

That said, there is once again a phenomenon at play here that South Africans of all political or ideological shades might want to ponder.

It is the phenomenon of mass popularity which is sometimes afforded to people of questionable integrity. There have been many such examples in the past 10 years and even Robert Mugabe gets a hearty cheer when he attends the inauguration of South Africa's president.

There was a time when this could have been ascribed to a backlash against institutions traditionally dominated by whites (not least of which being the media and the judiciary). However, apartheid is no more and these institutions have generally been substantially transformed.

Yet the phenomenon persists. Perhaps it is an indication that we haven't moved as far as we had hoped since 1994.

And perhaps there is another lesson that we can learn from the whole Shaik/Zuma affair: that we need to break out of the racial mindsets that apartheid spawned and start assessing issues on their own merits. Glib generalisations ultimately do not serve the country's interests.

With acknowledgement to the Cape Times.