TOM EATON | God knows how the Bushiris fled, but praise be that they did

I don’t know about camels, the eyes of needles, or the kingdom of Heaven, but it turns out it’s pretty easy for a rich man to enter the Republic of Malawi.

The specifics remain shrouded in political and logistical mystery, but what seems clear is that Shepherd Bushiri, a brilliant salesman who has amassed a fortune by selling a product you can’t test until you die, has Holy Ghosted on SA.

As the news broke on Saturday that he had skipped bail and skedaddled with his wife, many South Africans began to speculate that the Bushiris had been snatched up to salvation in a flaming chariot manufactured by the Boeing Corporation and belonging to Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera.

Chakwera, it quickly emerged, had spent the previous day in SA, and to the conspiracy theorists the truth was clear: the Bushiris had been smuggled aboard Chakwera’s aircraft, presumably rolled up in a carpet, or, to make sure that nobody looked at them, disguised as the in-flight safety precaution pamphlet.

It was pure speculation but it proved irresistible, as even a cabinet minister sidled up to the idea.

I don’t need to tell you that this tweet has now been shared 2,000 times, because, as we all know, the best way to stamp out fake news is to repeat it to your 955,000 followers.

“A whole head of state smuggling a fugitive from justice?” tweeted Tito Mboweni. “Tell me it’s fake news. Unbelievable! Must be fake. Has to be. People must not spread fake news.” I don’t need to tell you that this tweet has now been shared 2,000 times, because, as we all know, the best way to stamp out fake news is to repeat it to your 955,000 followers, albeit with a bit of pearl-clutching so you can pretend you’re not adding another squirt of lighter-fuel to the fire.

Since the weekend, however, a familiar helplessness has returned, as the departments whose job it was not to let Bushiri escape wring their hands, gazing at the floor where the drool from their lower lips is starting to pool. Geez. Gone, you say? Have you looked under the bed? You have? Well, flip, man, then I don’t know ...

On Monday, both governments denied that the Bushiris had boarded Air Lazarus, and I believe them.

Back in 2014, Chakwera explained that God had told him to enter politics, telling him (and this is God’s actual quote): “I’m extending your ministry so that you are able to pastor a whole nation.” I find it very difficult to believe that someone who gets such specific instructions from God wouldn’t have received some sort of warning from the Almighty, perhaps in a dream, whereby an angelic cabin attendant carrying a flaming tomato juice alerted him that there was a fugitive hiding in the aft loo.

Besides, it’s not very difficult luring charlatans out of their hiding place in the ceiling of a Boeing 737: usually all it takes is a bundle of R200 notes rolled down the aisle, but if that doesn’t work you can always get the cabin crew to announce over the intercom that a rival prophet will be doing a short preflight sermon and collection, and wait for your fugitive to fling himself out of the air vents like a very well-dressed oxygen mask during a cabin depressurisation.

All of which suggests, rather disappointingly, that the Bushiris’ own personal flight from Egypt didn’t involve spending three hours folded in half inside adjacent LazyBoy recliners, hissing at each other to “just hold it in!”

Instead, the current consensus seems to be that they probably drove out, taking a moment to brush Patricia De Lille’s cobweb border fence off their noses, though I’m still secretly hoping for another scenario whereby their followers hastily wove them an enormous wicker basket, into which they lay the Bushiris, and pushed them out into the Limpopo, to drift downstream until at last they came to rest in a clump of bulrushes ...

Still, it all remains as murky as the last sip of communion wine, which has left a void into which many South Africans are pouring their feelings.

Many on social media are angry about contempt for our laws, or the arrogance of the untouchably wealthy. Others are despairingly condemning our hollowed-out law-enforcement agencies.

But let me tell you why the whole thing delights me.

It delights me because they ran. They tucked tail and fled. And I haven’t seen the powerful or the wealthy flee before the law in SA for a long, long time.

Oh, the Bushiris said that they feared for their lives, but it was fear of a jail cell that put angel-wings on their heels. And after so many years of watching the Ace Magashules or Markus Joostes laugh at the law and stay put, knowing that there are phalanxes of lawyers and decades of appeals between them and a cell, well, God forgive me but just for a moment, it felt damnably good.