I have a friend — successful in business — who holds the strange view that corruption is not as bad as we make it out to be.

Corruption is in many cases just a form of re-distribution of wealth that actually stimulates the economy. Let us say someone wins a state tender at inflated prices via corrupt means. "Whilst the public pays more for a service, the money thus made does not disappear", says my friend.

If that person buys a house or three smart cars or takes his family to a luxury resort, those actions stimulate business. If a business does well, it will pay more taxes and will employ more people, thus ensuring without intention that the corrupt money in the end actually benefits society.

My friend — of mixed Indian and colonial decent — is fiercely non-racist. He believes there is a lot of racism in SA lurking behind the pinpointing of liberation politicians for their perceived actions of self-enrichment.

"Remember those five star hotels and guest-houses and car dealers get paid handsomely and deliver an honest service according to the ministerial handbook".

After a good bottle of Ken Forrester blended Petit late-night in December, he continued his case:
In the tradition of Hobbes and Marx, he believes human beings are wolves and life is about class advancement. This is not particular to a race or a continent. This is a hall-mark of the political system as such.

After 1948 Afrikaners — with the English War of 1899-1902 and the depression of 1933 fresh in their memories — used race to exclude 80 percent of the population from competition in the real estate and job market. "Apartheid was a class system", says my friend, "condoned with Christian language of giving others in parallel fashion what you took by force in the first place."

That is why good, democratic and free America can topple a regime in Iraq to stimulate the arms industry and ensure reconstruction is done by US companies afterward. That is why Europeans bomb Libya in the name of freedom and democracy. But — as Marx taught — these moral tenets are but the super-structure of the real motive: oil contracts. And this is why it is refreshing to hear Smuts Ngonyama say that liberators did not join the struggle to be poor.

Politicians are masters to use moral language. The real motive lies below the surface: self-enrichment.

Any normal person knows that if you wish to retire comfortably, you need to build up a pension. The key factors are years of service and level of remuneration. My friend makes this point quite clearly:

If apartheid or colonialism or communism has deprived you of educational or business opportunities, and you do get into power, your income-generating years are short. Politics and connected business are then the only places where you can earn decent money without arduous hours in the library.

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