A saint and a devil walked into an SA bar

Ah! The blighted fortunes of the delightful Ms Vicki Momberg. She’s starting her second week in tjoekie and her plight is dismal.
She still doesn’t know whether she’ll be granted leave to appeal her three-year jail sentence for crimen injuria, of which a year was suspended. Her lawyer was ill, so the hearing was postponed another week.

Bail, normally a formality when the offender is not a flight risk - I mean, who would give succour to a fugitive, unrepentant über-racist with a potty mouth? Australia remains denied to her. As a result, even if she eventually succeeds in escaping a custodial sentence, she’ll have experienced at least some of the chill of incarceration.

This surely is a good thing? A cold stone cell will almost certainly take the edge off her bigotry. Justice, however, should not be about popularity or scapegoating.

That Momberg is a deeply unpleasant person, reviled the length and breadth of the land, should not add a single day to her sentence. Nor, of course, should the adulation of the strident masses subtract a single day off anyone’s sentence.

Justice, after all, is blind. Justice is even-handed. Or so we are told.

The death this week of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is a stark reminder of the vagaries of the South African criminal justice system. The two women, despite diametrically opposed ideologies, are sides to the same coin - both examples of the debased currency of a populist judiciary, alert and responsive to political pressures.

Madikizela-Mandela is currently the focus of fawning hagiographies that gloss over her dark side, her violent and abusive nature. Winnie, who as a young woman had shown extraordinary courage against a violent regime, was, as “mother of the nation”, in 1989 accused of the kidnapping of four youths, and the murder of one, the 14-year-old Stompie Seipei.

In 1991, she was found guilty of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault, and sentenced to a six-year jail term. On appeal, this was reduced to a fine and a suspended two-year sentence.

So Madikizela-Mandela’s out-of-pocket penalty for the seizure and physical abuse of a child was all of R10000. Contrast this with Momberg’s penalty for the verbal abuse of a police officer - a group of people who, dealing as they do with the dregs of society, are accustomed to daily belittlement and slurs.

Her hearing, in the Equality Court, ended with a fine exactly 10 times higher than Madikizela-Mandela’s, a whopping R100000 for an unemployed and unemployable estate agent. And then, second round, the three-year jail sentence.

For Madikizela-Mandela, being a Struggle icon and the wife of former president Nelson Mandela came, literally, with a get-out-of-jail free card. At no stage - not after being charged, not while awaiting sentencing, not while awaiting the appeal - did Madikizela-Mandela spend a single night in jail.

Madikizela-Mandela’s bail, while on appeal, was all of R150. Of course, Momberg has such a dangerous tongue that she cannot get bail of any quantum. The devil incarnate, she might lash someone to death with the K-word.

In 1992, Madikizela-Mandela was accused of engineering the murder of Dr Abu-Baker Asvat, a former family friend who had treated Seipei at her house, where he was initially held after being kidnapped. She was never charged.

However, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1997 probed her role in the murder but was forced to abandon its hearings amid claims that witnesses were being intimidated on her orders. In its final report, the TRC declared Madikizela-Mandela “politically and morally accountable for gross violations of human rights”.

Not everything went smoothly for Madikizela-Mandela. At one stage, she was so hated by the residents of Soweto for her reign of terror that they gathered outside her home and set it on fire. The United Democratic Front, the internal stalking horse of the then still exiled and banned ANC, “disowned” her for gross violations of human rights.

Fortunately for Madikizela-Mandela, her rapid elevation over the past few days from the status of kidnapper, child abuser and crook - she was sentenced to five years jail for defrauding a funeral fund of R1million, reduced to a suspended three-and-a-half years on appeal - to secular sainthood, is an orgasmically populist process that has nothing to do with reason.

So, Saint Winnie it is.

One can argue, as her acolytes would, that Madikizela-Mandela did not benefit from judicial favouritism because of political pressure.

That her treatment on all these offences was judicially sound and that the matters of bail, appeal and sentence were dealt with in a procedural correctly and fair manner.

If that were so, then kudos to the judges and prosecutors involved.

But it is not something that the acolytes want to look at too closely, since it would contradict the essence of stereotyping and scapegoating.

Embarrassingly, given the simplistic narratives that have come to dominate our racially fraught political discourse, all the major judicial players who treated Madikizela-Mandela so scrupulously were members of that widely despised group, that of the white male. And many of them of the even more despised Afrikaner sub-species, nogal.

Two women. Both deeply flawed. But in terms of how they were treated judicially, which one do the courts say you should be more wary of?

* Follow WSM on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye

** The views expressed here are not necessarily those ofIndependent Media.