The Thick End of the Wedge [Business Day, 2006-11-20]

Before the Brett Kebble murder arrests push the kerfuffle over misquoting Judge Hilary Squires off the stage, let’s deal with the increasing questions about why Squires didn’t make more of an effort to ensure more people knew that he never said Jacob Zuma and Schabir Shaik had had a “generally corrupt relationship”. This is wrong, and suggestions that Squires might have been negligent (or even Machiavellian) in the apparent timidity of his efforts to stop the mis-attribution of the phrase are extremely unfair to him. He gave a precise and finely crafted judgment in the Shaik trial. What more should he have done?

As far as I can tell, Squires tried twice to warn us at Business Day about the fact that he never said what we (and everyone else) were reporting he said. Both efforts were made before the Supreme Court rejected Shaik’s appeals. He first e-mailed me on November 17 last year. I do not recall ever seeing his message and I suspect it may never have arrived. I cannot explain why or how, other than to refer the sceptical to other sources in Johncom, who I would hope may confirm how erratic our e-mail service used to be.

That e-mail, which I read for the first time last week when it was sent to me by someone in Durban, was written by a polite, humorous and retiring man. I would immediately have acted on it had I seen it. But for the next 11 months we continued to repeat the “generally corrupt” phrase and to attribute it incorrectly to Squires. It was this phrase which, more than anything, upset Zuma supporters, as they rightly argued judgment had been passed on him without him ever standing trial. That was Squires’ point!

Then, on October 4, Squires sent another e-mail, this time to our legal affairs correspondent, Ernest Mabuza, making much the same (polite) point. Mabuza is a quiet and unexcitable man. He read Squires’ e-mail, noted its contents and told his news editor about it as something worth remembering for future coverage. He also mentioned it to other colleagues writing about Shaik and Zuma. I assume delivery of this information was typically low-key and that, for this reason, its import was not immediately appreciated.

On the morning of Friday November 10, the usual group of editors sat around our conference table to talk about the next day’s edition of The Weekender. The Shaik appeals story had gone, we thought. After we had talked through the news list it was clear we didn’t yet have a lead.

I next asked about a lead after lunch when, for the first time, someone mentioned to me a letter from Squires denying he had used the term “generally corrupt”. The hair stood up on the back of my ageing neck. I believed it would be in the public interest to report what he was saying. The rest is history *1.

Squires, of course, has been unwillingly drawn back into the limelight and to the extent that it has hurt him, I am very sorry. I can still hear him delivering the Shaik judgment last year and I don’t think I have ever been more proud to be a South African as I was then. Here was a rare integrity and intelligence making sense for me of what had once been complex. It was a joy to listen to.

Having done his job properly, he had every right to expect to be able to go home and continue his retirement. His efforts to correct our errors should have been enough and I think it is absurd now that anyone should suggest he should have done any more than he did.

Publication	Business Day
Date	2006-11-20
Reporter	Peter Bruce
Web Link	www.businessday.co.za