The small Pacific nation of Vanuatu is carbon-negative. This means that it takes in more pollutants than it sends out into the world and is therefore the perfect country to give the Gupta brothers a passport.
Not that I blame Vanuatu for selling citizenship to Jacob Zuma’s former employers. On its best day, it is a nation clinging to a scattering of reefs and volcanoes in a very big, very unsympathetic sea, and its best days are rapidly sliding away into that sea as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of storms and flooding.
Should certain ice shelves decide that they want to leave home and see the world, the whole country might have to up sticks and move somewhere else, and given the price of property in Australia right now, the good people of Vanuatu need all the foreign currency they can get.
Which is where the bad people of Vanuatu come in, or at least the bad people who have bought citizenship but live everywhere and nowhere as part of that vast, often invisible caravan of the nomadic rich.
Indeed, it seems that the Guptas have found their tribe, joining a list of newly minted islanders who, according the Guardian, include South African brothers Raees and Ameer Cajee (accused of skedaddling with R70bn worth of stolen cryptocurrency), an Italian businessman who tried to extort the Vatican, and the former head of Algeria’s paramilitary police force, wanted back home for treason.
This is to say nothing of the list of citizens-by-purchase who are not accused of crimes, including “a Fifa boss, an Emirati princess and a Nigerian televangelist”, as well as a person suspected of being a North Korean politician, all of whom presumably just wanted to live somewhere quiet where you can feel the sand between your toes and the non-extradition treaty between your fingers.
No, Vanuatu seems to be a very sensible choice for high-flyers trying to get away, either from the rat race or furious Nigerians wondering when the miracle they paid for is going to happen. The Guptas have always had a good head for business, whether it was targeting the useful idiot of Nkandla or escaping to Dubai, described by Transparency International as a “money-laundering paradise”. Vanuatu really does feel like the next logical step.
It becomes terribly easy to believe that this country of laws exists only in the anxious minds of people who are neither ambitious nor violent enough to lunge for their own pile.
Back at home, the realisation that the Guptas are unlikely ever to face justice in SA has been met with quiet resignation. Perhaps that’s also logical: when a country ties itself into legal, historical and quasi-moral knots over whether to arrest whole war criminals, and its own president has just had the mysterious cash in his couch hidden away by a phalanx of footstools and fart-catchers in government, very few people can still believe that the law is always followed to its letter.
No wonder, then, that the press has been so gripped by the escape and re-arrest of murderer and rapist Thabo Bester, apprehended by Tanzanian authorities as he and his moll headed for the Kenyan border.
Reading those headlines, we can tell ourselves that the bad guys don’t always get away; that we are, in fact, still a country of laws, or at least a country that shares a border with a country that shares a border with a country of laws.
Certainly, the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) seemed particularly bullish, telling the press that “now that the big embarrassment of not having apprehended him while still in country is over”, it was time to figure out how it all happened.
I would also urge Popcru to try to figure out what “embarrassment” means. After all, allowing Bester to escape was a crime. Failing to arrest him was incompetence and possibly also a crime. The only embarrassment I can see in any of this is what Tanzania managed to achieve with a fraction of the resources Bheki Cele has at his disposal, and that embarrassment is far from over.
Still, I understand the urge to celebrate a win, because without these moments, we would have to see the Guptas’ and Bester’s escape not as anomalies but rather the latest iteration of a terribly familiar pattern, stretching back centuries, whereby ambitious, unscrupulous and violent men take what they want from the poor of this country and then leave, never thinking of their victims again unless it is to tell an anecdote to their friends about what world-class suckers those South Africans are.
Once we start dwelling on how, exactly, the Guptas got away so completely, and how Bester did what he did, and why it is that stealing from a shop gets you arrested but stealing from the poor gets you re-elected, it becomes terribly easy to believe that this country of laws exists only in the anxious minds of people who are neither ambitious nor violent enough to lunge for their own pile.
When we stand staring at a new hole torn in the fabric of our society, and smell the reek of sulphur and borderless, consequence-free marauding, it’s too easy to start feeling that our rules, instead of keeping us safe, are only keeping us small and docile; that our communities are simply battery farms where taxpayers cluck away their short lives, squeezing out egg after egg for the pirates, dreaming about flying free.
No, far better to cheer the arrest of Bester and leave Vanuatu to its fate.
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