Publication: Business Day Issued: Date: 2007-07-07 Reporter: Tim Cohen

Ordinary Actions in Extraordinary Times

 

Publication 

Business Day
Date 2007-07-07

Reporter

 Tim Cohen

Web Link

www.businessday.co.za

 

“It’s a bitter thought, but you can’t help feeling for Schabir Shaik. His R500 000 seems so trivial by comparison, but then, I suppose, we are only Africans”

I couldn’t help smiling inwardly last week when the story broke about the shares in BAE Systems plummeting on news that the US justice department had initiated a probe into reports that the defence giant had secretly paid £1bn to Saudi Prince Bandar to secure an $86bn arms deal.

The investigation relates to the al-Yamamah aircraft deal negotiated in 1985, which former UK prime minister Tony Blair disgracefully decided to call off, citing national security.

The movement of the share price (8% down on the day of the report, slashing about $1bn off the market value) is interesting for a host of reasons. It’s particularly interesting that the share price did not move as dramatically in the company’s home base when the UK’s Guardian newspaper originally broke the story.

In the US, the separation of powers is not just a theoretical notion, so an investigation constitutes a market-sensitive event. Not so in the UK, which does not have a written constitution, allowing Blair sufficient legal ambiguity to declare the investigation off.

But personally, the story has resonance too, because a long time ago I was on the receiving end of an extremely aggressive BAE spokesman, who chewed my ear off for close to half an hour about the company’s impeccable ethics. I was obviously asking about the South African arms deal, and specifically why BAE had won the contract for the Hawk trainers when it appeared the Italian aircraft was not only cheaper, but had scored better in the South African National Defence Force’s own initial rating system.

I still remember this adamant voice haranguing me down the phone line from London: “We did absolutely nothing wrong. If you print that we did something wrong, you would be lying.”

Well, I suppose to those who are prepared to pay £1bn in 1985, a few million dollars would be … what? A tip?

It’s a bitter thought, but you can’t help feeling for Schabir Shaik. His R500 000 seems so trivial by comparison, but then, I suppose, we are only Africans.

And anyway, arms companies always get the last laugh ­ they are too crucial to governments to be thrown to the wolves.

BAE’s share price, which has in any case been on a tear over the past few years, has already regained much of the ground it lost since last week.

But the story got me thinking about heroism. Spy novelist John le Carre wrote in the Russia House, I think it was, that a hero is not an extraordinary person who does extraordinary things in extraordinary times, but an ordinary person who does ordinary things in extraordinary times.

I may be paraphrasing, but it’s similar to something tennis player Arthur Ashe apparently said: “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”

What does this have to do with us? Actually, quite a lot, because believe it or not, this story began in a coffee house in Kyalami. I have to think that a former employee of the French embassy in Pretoria *1, Susan Delique, could smile to herself a bit over BAE’s woes.

She did an ordinary thing; she kept a slip of paper that told of a flagrantly illegal act and gave it to the police. It seems so simple now, so undramatic. But it was heroic.

This piece of paper was the basis for an investigation by the Scorpions. It not only sparked a prosecution here, but got the press in the UK and elsewhere in Europe interested.

If there was bribery in the French part of the deal, which was a tiny portion of the whole package, where would other roads lead? They led to Bandar and Blair and so many others.

It was just a half an hour in a coffee shop. And a notion of what an ordinary person should do.

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and Business Day.


*1       Was Susan Delique a former employee of the French embassy in Pretoria or was she a former employee of the French defence company Thomson-CSF Holdings (Southern Africa) in Pretoria and secretary to Alain Thetard ?

Or both ?