Spare a thought for Carl Niehaus today. His life is completely shattered, while there are far more evil men in our country - and in our politics - who are going from strength to strength.

Yes, it is true that the ANC's handling of this affair tells us a lot about how they really view corruption. But, after top ANC leaders, including the person who is today the deputy president of South Africa, demonstrated their hero-worship for convicted fraudster Tony Yengeni on his way to jail, shouldn't we have known that?

Let's try and move beyond ANC bashing. Let's try and understand what happened to the human being Carl Niehaus and see if that provides us with a bigger picture.

It is beginning to appear as if there was very little truth about Niehaus's life.

He lied about suffering from a serious disease to get sympathy and score a holiday in Mauritius. He lied about having a degree and a doctorate ("summa cum laude", nogal); he apparently only has a matric certificate behind his name. He lied about being on the boards of companies and institutions. He lied to people he owed money to. He falsified signatures. He lied to his church, he lied to his own party and his own comrades, even after last week's exposé of his wrongdoing.

In fact, we now have very good reason to believe that the deeply disturbing account he wrote on a popular website last year of how he was gang-raped in jail was also a complete fabrication.

Why? He was never a friend of mine, but I knew him well enough to know that he is intelligent with good social skills and quite charming. He had so much going for him, why would he make up such stuff? (I always did think that the combination of Calvinism - Carl was a theology student - and communism was a sure recipe for someone who would bore you out of your skull.)

His obsession with material wealth is equally puzzling. Here is an ordinary man from a conservative middle-class Afrikaner family, 'n kaalvoet seun van Zeerust, actually, who suddenly believes he is entitled to Porsches, Mercedes Benzes and four-wheel-drive cars and palatial homes and island holidays. Why did he feel it necessary to project the image of a multi-millionaire playboy? He had some fancy, well-paid jobs that put him in the top 5% income bracket in the country, why did he want so much more?

Psychologists and Niehaus's therapists will surely have some answers relating to his personality and childhood. Those are his private affairs that we don't need to know about.

But I would think a big part of the explanation would have to do with the post-liberation culture of entitlement in the country, and of a popular belief in the ANC that those who had contributed to the struggle against apartheid deserve to be materially wealthy now. In the famous words of the former spokesman of the ANC presidency, Smuts Ngonyama, they "did not struggle to be poor".

Niehaus saw many of his comrades move from being dirt-poor in 1994 to being dollar-millionaires 10, 15 years later, many without doing much. Some got rich because they were among the chosen few to be given millions on a silver platter in the name of Black Economic Empowerment.

Others were favoured by getting state contracts or shares in enterprises that could be turned into big heaps of cash, some sold political influence to unscrupulous business people like Brett Kebble and some simply stole themselves rich.

Carl already had one major drawback: he was an uptight, lily-white Boerseun who couldn't dance and had a very bad dress sense.

He got rid of his sweet but rather mousy white wife, who went to jail with him, and started dating sexy black socialites, hoping the coolness would rub off.

Carl wanted to be like Tony Yengeni: the ultimate Mr Cool in the best Fabiani suits, designer sunglasses, a sleek German off-road vehicle that no one ever takes off the tar roads and a sexy wife who looks like a black Jackie Kennedy.

Tony never even had a proper job outside his party, neither does he have much education, Carl must have thought, so why does he get to be the hippest man in town?

The minute you start pretending to be someone or something you're not, the lies start piling up and you have to lie more and more to cover up the previous lies. A year or three of that and your ability to distinguish between the truth and your own lies starts diminishing.

When he went to jail as an underground operative of Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1984, Carl Niehaus was an honest young man of principle and idealism who was actually studying to become a dominee in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Perhaps the devil made him do it *1.