A SENIOR government official wondered aloud three years ago about whether SA and the African National Congress (ANC) could afford to have Jacob Zuma go to prison.

I wonder today whether SA and the ANC can afford to have Zuma not go to prison should he be found guilty of corruption and defeating the ends of justice.

The question of what the country can or cannot afford is about political cost.

When the state official asked all those years ago whether we could bear the cost of sending Zuma to prison, he was, I imagine, thinking about the political instability that might ensue, especially in KwaZulu-Natal; he was thinking about the sullying of an impeccable struggle CV by the taint of graft, and about the many men and women in the state and the ANC whose conduct has been no different from Zuma’s. The official’s concerns were not unfounded.

There have always been elements in KwaZulu-Natal who believe SA and the ANC are ruled by a Xhosa Nostra that has it in for Zulus, and that any Zulu-speaking person who falls foul of the ANC or the laws of the country is a victim of a political conspiracy. These elements have been among Zuma’s loudest and crudest supporters.

The state official’s concern about the tainting of a good anti-apartheid resumé has to do with Zuma’s stint on Robben Island. For very good reasons, we continue to see the island prison as a finishing school for revolutionaries.

We deliberately ignore that for a long time Robben Island was home also to common criminals and that, for some of the political prisoners on the island, there was very little separating them from the hardened murderers, rapists and thieves in their midst.

Some of our political prisoners were common criminals who happened to have been caught fighting the good fight. There are many such people in the ANC today.

This is not to ignore the fact that the apartheid enterprise was such that, to exist, black people had to break the law. Living under apartheid meant to live on the edges of criminality: swopping a dompas with a relative so she could move across town; buying alcohol from an illegal shebeen because a bottle store would not sell you any; using a “white” toilet while no one was looking because it was the only one close by; walking through a “whites only” park because it was the only way to exit a “white” suburb quicker and before the antiblack curfew set in. I have listed the pettiest examples here, but there were many such infractions that meant that black life under apartheid was by definition an outlawed existence. However, this did not mean that people, especially black folks, did not know right from wrong.

Communities still had moral codes by which they lived, and which were policed and enforced communally. These codes governed the way communities dealt with muggings, robberies, murders, teenage pregnancies, domestic abuse and many other instances of social breakdown.

That is why also not every arrest, not every sentencing, even under apartheid, was lamented. There were many people when I was growing up who went to prison because that was where they belonged. They deserved to go to jail.

Does Zuma deserve to go to prison? Should Selebi go to prison? The men must obviously be presumed innocent until found guilty by a court of law. There is, however, no reason to think that SA and the ANC cannot bear the cost of their having to go to prison should they be found guilty. One only has to think of how diminished are the stature of the ANC and the integrity of our criminal justice system each time a drunk Tony Yengeni, SA’s most pampered parolee, crashes a car.

Besides, we already have a precedent of ANC loyalists going to prison for all kinds of abuses. Pat Mathosa, an ANC strongman in Free State, had to spend some time in the slammer after pointing a firearm at a traffic cop and telling the poor cop he did not know who he was messing with.

Thami Ntenteni, Thabo Mbeki’s spokesman from way back in the day, went to prison for culpable homicide or some such. There are numerous ANC-aligned warlords and thugs who are in prison today for breaking the law. Some of them had struggle credentials as strong as Selebi’s.

To be fair to the government official who asked whether we could afford to have Zuma go to prison, his question was asked under different circumstances. Things have changed. Things have become so bad today that the only question to ask is whether SA and the ANC can afford not to have Zuma and Selebi go to prison should they be found guilty.

One only has to hear stories about one of the chief beneficiaries of the corruption from the arms deal, a former ministerial sidekick who allegedly goes around beating up women and brandishing rifles at those who dare complain about his conduct. People like him belong in jail.

The ministerial sidekick knows, however, that there is little chance of his going to prison for as long as we have top dogs saying there is nothing wrong with accepting bribes, and Mbeki insisting there was nothing corrupt about the arms deal.

There is a great deal wrong with our country and it might not be a bad idea to concur with criminologist Anthony Altbeker’s suggestion that we build more prisons and arrest more people.

Too bad that such prisons would be filled mainly by black men such as Zuma and Selebi, should they be found guilty, of course. Some people belong in jail. We cannot afford to have it be otherwise.

With acknowledgements to Jacob Dlamini and Business Day.