Are you sure you want to see Jacob Zuma go on trial? He should, right? I mean, the charges against him are serious and he wouldn’t be trying so hard to avoid a trial if he thought it was going to be a breeze.

And if you paid any attention to the trial of his alleged corruptor, Schabir Shaik, you’d already be wondering how come Zuma wasn’t already in jail. In short, the evidence that he took money (it is said up to R3m) from Shaik over a number of years and for a variety of reasons — from car washes to school fees to a supposed bribe — is pretty damning.

It’s the French bribe that still gets me. Five-hundred thousand rand (even R500000 a year) is so little it speaks, if true, either for the contempt in which Shaik must have held Zuma in order to be able to countenance using him in the way his trial proved, or the real naivety of Zuma in thinking he was being offered a lot of money for nothing.

Perhaps it was a combination of both. Returning ANC exile leaders were easy prey. There was no mechanism for looking after them, and there should have been. Business or the state should have set the top 500 people up with funded bank accounts and decent pensions. We are paying a much higher price now, for corruption, than we could have got away with then, to fund these people. Perhaps no amount of money would have been enough. I heard of one ANC “businessman” who recently told Vodacom he wasn’t looking for too much out of its BEE deal — just about R100m.

It doesn’t matter though. What matters is the cost to the country of trying to “get” the people who have looted the system since 1994. There are so many, I think we need to find a political way to forgive them. No one expects the rapid creation of a middle class to be pretty.

We need a kind of Truth Commission that covers the arms deal and all the other rotten things that official inquiries have been formed to look at. We could offer Jacob Zuma a deal — tell the truth to the commission, repay 25% of the money, and walk away free forever. And all those ministers and MECs whose wives and husbands have become rich at the taxpayers’ expense. We could set them free too, if they told us the truth and paid up a little.

Or we can put our next president on trial for fraud and corruption as planned. He’ll probably be found guilty, and then we can try to put him in jail! That’ll be fun.

AND on to sport. We beat the All Blacks without our captain, without our best scrumhalf or eighth man, with only one of our best props and our best lock off the field and even though we kept kicking the ball to them.

So well done Peter de Villiers! Heaven help rugby teams when we stop being politically correct.

And when we stop believing our own PR: World Champions, best in the world, a scrum to fear, a lineout without peer. My goodness, is there no end to our capacity for self-delusion? It’s why we were so drilled in the first Test. Why is it that South Africans always need a wake-up call before they start doing their best?

It isn’t just rugby. The lamentable first three days of the Test at Lord’s is a measure of the same disease at work in cricket: the fastest bowlers, the most rapidly matured captain and a spinner in the team to boot! We can’t possibly lose.

And then the Poms take us apart like they were clubbing seals. The time of writing is Sunday afternoon, and our openers seem, finally, to be making a fist of it. But even if they stave off defeat, I hope they drop young Dale Steyn for bowling so badly last Thursday and Friday and play Andre Nel at Headingley. A little tough love might remind Steyn what line and length are. In the old days, he’d have been on the first mail ship home.

With acknowledgements to Peter Bruce and Business Day.