Publication	Business Day Weekender
Date	2006-11-25
Web Link	www.bday.co.za

For its part, the Sunday Times last week came, guns blazing, to counter the damage done by the “generally corrupt relationship” fiasco. The Times had initially ignored The Weekender’s story, probably thinking that it meant little and would disappear. It didn’t.

Last Sunday the Times finally deigned to write about the issue. Judge Hilary Squires, argued a somewhat overwritten opinion offering, had indeed “found” a corrupt relationship between Jacob Zuma and Schabir Shaik. This is so, no matter what Cosatu and the ANC Youth League, or latterly Squires himself, choose to say.

This must have been very confusing for the ordinary reader. On one hand here’s a high court judge saying that he never made a particular finding. On the other, the country’s most important paper says he did just that: “Judge Squires did not, as he has pointed out, use the term ‘generally corrupt relationship’, but his ruling amounted to just that.” Helpfully, the reader is taken right into the inner workings of Squires’s mind: “Had Judge Squires not believed the state had proved (a corrupt relationship), he would have acquitted Shaik on the first corruption count.” I really hope they don’t teach this sort of logic to trainee prosecutors. Oh, and Cosatu’s response to the controversy has been “sinister”.

But it was Hogarth who showed the biggest determination to settle the dispute. Business Day’s Karima Brown had called the Supreme Court of Appeal’s repetition of the offending phrase “sloppy”, “callous” and “unprofessional”. On how many occasions did Brown make this same mistake in articles under her byline in Business Day, asked Hogarth, gleefully parroting former Democractic Alliance researcher James Myburgh. Brown made the error nine times, Hogarth rejoiced. Which makes her at best “sloppy”, “callous” and “unprofessional”.

Very clever, but I’m certain she made the error a lot more frequently than that. So have I, and The Weekender, and Hogarth, and the Times, and James Myburgh and….

(I wonder, if I had as much time on my hands as Myburgh, and could count how many times everyone had made the error, who would come off worst?)

Anyway, I’ve gone back to Karima Brown’s column to find the precise place where she absolves herself, or Business Day or The Weekender, of all complicity in the mistake. I found none. It’s too much to expect that Hogarth would do the same. I suppose it’s easier to lift the hot air straight from James Myburgh.

It would appear that the best way for The Weekender to respond to Squires’s letter would have been to note its contents, file it, and shut the hell up. *1

As unconvinced as I am by the Sunday Times’s fuzzy logic about “general corruption”, I must admit I remain touched by the newspaper’s earnest determination to save us all from Zuma and his sinister friends at Cosatu.

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*1       The best way to respond to Squires’s letter would have been to note its contents, publish the true facts without emotion, publish a balanced analysis of its legal and other implications, publish any appropriate apologies, file it and then shut the hell up.