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MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

THE conviction on Friday of former police commissioner Jackie Selebi on charges of corruption leaves many questions unanswered.

THE conviction on Friday of former police commissioner Jackie Selebi on charges of corruption leaves many questions unanswered.

Judge Meyer Joffe found that Selebi had received substantial amounts of money from gangster Glen Agliotti and then did him favours, including showing him a top-secret document what contained substantial sections of the national intelligence estimate.

Joffe also found that Selebi had been a very bad witness who fabricated evidence and lied to the court. Not that Agliotti was a much better witness, but the court found that he had to be believed - and not Selebi.

The conviction must place a question mark over the actions of former president Thabo Mbeki, who appointed Selebi and took steps aimed at protecting him and claimed that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Selebi even after he (Mbeki) was briefed by the national director of public prosecutions about the evidence against the former top cop.

Why was Mbeki so adamant that Selebi should not be arrested? Why did Mbeki ask us to trust him on Selebi? And why did he maintain - in the face of overwhelming evidence provided to him - that there was no evidence to suggest that Selebi was a crook?

Why did he appoint him in the first place? Does it not show - at the very least - a spectacular lack of judgment on the part of our former president? One should also ask if Selebi would ever have been investigated and prosecuted by the police and whether he might not have still been our police commissioner had it not been for the Scorpions.

If the now defunct Scorpions had not taken on the case, chances are that we would never have known that Selebi was a crook. The conviction of Selebi thus underlines the sheer folly of the decision to abolish the Scorpions.

During Selebi's trial it emerged that several members of the SA Police Service tried to help Selebi to prevent him from ever facing charges of corruption. The prosecutor was arrested, and acting crime intelligence boss Mulangi Mphego intervened to secure testimony from Agliotti to weaken the case against Selebi.

Meanwhile, national director of public prosecutions Menzi Simelane has dropped all charges against Mphego relating to the Selebi case. Why was this done? Who is being protected? Can one trust Simelane to have dropped the charges purely for legally sound reasons? The conviction of Selebi suggests that the decision to drop all charges against Mphego was at best dubious.

For the conspiracy theorists, or even for those sceptical of the integrity of the police, questions must now also be posed about the role of Selebi and other members of the police in the investigation into the murder of Brett Kebble.

Selebi was called from the scene of the crime and it is alleged that he allowed Kebble's car to be removed from there before the police could gather the required forensic evidence. Was Selebi protecting anyone when he allegedly did this?

At Kebble's funeral, Mbeki's side-kick Essop Pahad bizarrely said that "what Brett said to any of us in private should remain private".

It is wellknown that Kebble bankrolled the ANC, and questions will inevitably be raised about the link between Selebi, Kebble, Mbeki and the financial dealings of the ANC and some of its members. Whether Selebi and others are hiding anything is, of course, unclear.

Lastly, the conviction underlines the fact that the relevant piece of legislation on corruption - passed by the ANC-dominated Parliament - is excellent. Where a political will exists to investigate and prosecute corrupt individuals, whether they are politicians, state officials or private businesspeople, the legislation will provide sufficient legal backup to secure convictions.

In that sense, the prosecution and conviction of Selebi is remarkable.

The question does arise, though, whether there is sufficient political will on the part of the Zuma administration to ensure that this act will be utilised properly to help stamp out corruption in both the public and the private sectors. Given the fact that President Jacob Zuma himself only escaped prosecution for corruption through the shenanigans of the NPA, this is sadly far from clear.

Political will is key to fighting corruption. If we see more high-profile cases of private and public corruption brought to court, we will know the Zuma administration is serious about stamping out corruption. If we do not, we will know that it is rotten to the core.

lThe writer is a law professor at the University of Cape Town. This article was first published on his blog.

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