Tom Moyane, the star of the Theatre of the Absurd

If Pravin Gordhan has any sense (and I hope he doesn’t) he should quit now because they are going to get him out, through fair means or foul. Mostly foul means actually, evidenced by the unfolding this week of the most curious news story I have come across in my 35 years in journalism.

It’s so absurd that if it didn’t have such astonishingly worrying elements, it would be hilarious.

Only this incredulous tale of stupidity, menace, the threat of violence, scary secrecy and resolute determination to find fault where, it is apparent, there is none is very worrying and there is little mirth in its telling.

In a nutshell: Sars boss Tom Moyane emails the wrong document (erm… secret document sent in error? Dof right?) to a senior member of the Sars team, Vlok Symington.

So now he’s in a pickle. The document, if it gets into the wrong hands, could scupper the NPA’s stringent attempts to criminalise a decision taken by Gordhan and his lieutenants to approve the early retirement of a Sars employee, Ivan Pillay.

The document Moyane mailed in error is a statement made by a senior Sars lawyer disagreeing with the decision to prosecute the country’s finance minister. The word unethical is used. It seems the Sars legal brain could find no crime in the Pillay settlement agreement.

Picture this: the Sars guys sitting round a table debating Symington’s loyalty levels. Would he destroy the email? If not, would he leak it? And to whom?

If that email went public; you know how these things go viral these days with social media. If it got out… there would be humiliating embarrassment; bad press; and Sars-snickering from the public and everyone connected to this case.

Imagine what the naysayers would say of the NPA’s Shaun Abrahams’ paltry attempt to humiliate the Finance Minister, the lengths they would go to remove him from office.

For goodness sake, Tom Moyane probably said to his team: even our own man from our own legal team doesn’t think there’s a case to be answered by Gordhan.

And so they hatch a plan: Get the document back.

Then begins the insanity. They hold Symington hostage and bully him to get him to hand over the erroneously sent document.

Symington is locked in an office while they decide what to do, and he records, using his phone video, his time locked in with Sars staffers. He is very clear: he is being held against his will. Its all very dramatic.

In the late 1950s, a group of European playwrights began a form of drama that became known as the Theatre of the Absurd.

Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett (who can forget Waiting for Godot) and Eugene Ionesco were part of this genre that used the abandonment of conventional dramatic form to show the frailty of humans, and the utter futility of human struggle in a senseless world.

I look around me and am reminded of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, where townsfolk begin turning into rhinos, one by one.

The epidemic of rhinoceroses was seen as an allegory for the rise of Nazism and fascism during the Second World War – and people’s willingness to give themselves over, unquestioningly to Nazism. If not exactly that, then, to do nothing to oppose it or speak up against it, to acquiesce.

It has an echo in the South African story, where the majority of white people went along with apartheid, succumbing to it as they absorbed and reflected general opinion around them.

And now, yet again, we are witnessing a drama out of the Theatre of the Absurd unfolding around us.

A few voices denouncing what is being done to Pravin Gordhan, the unfairness of it all, are being raised – but the number is small enough for a whisper not a shout.

The large majority stand by and watch from the side-lines as the body we look to for protection from corruption and all state (and other) transgressions, the National Prosecuting Authority, are themselves the wolves in the chicken coop.

My father was a reasonable rational man who abhorred absurd generalisations: all white farmers are cruel to their field workers; Americans don’t understand irony – you know what I mean. And so he would be appalled if he heard me say I am concerned that the entire top level of Sars and the NPA are corrupt or corruptible. He would argue that there are, at the very least, a few good apples.

It would seem there are. The Sars lawyer who claimed the moral high ground saying there was no case to be brought against the Finance Minister is one. His declaration was certainly was not an opinion his senior colleagues shared. In fact it seems the general consensus among them was that his statement should be kept from the public and the media at all costs.

My dad also believed that nobody stood up well under intense scrutiny. Everyone has a flaw, no matter how small, that can be blown out of all proportion.

Interrogation; being questioned over and over and over again will slip the person being questioned up in the end and he will come out looking guilty – or with something to hide.

And so they will get Pravin Gordhan in the end. They will find he took a pencil home from the office one day, and charge him with theft.

Someone will testify that he peed in the pool in his junior year at school and he will be charged with public indecency.

If they want to get you, they will get you.

There’s the salutary tale of a man I will refer to as Mr Baki.

Mr Baki was… well… the kindest word would be acquiescent. He was dull, and uninterested and uninteresting. He was so passive he couldn’t make a fist. Mr Baki had two children, daughters – young teenagers at the time of this story.

As the years went by, Mrs Baki found her husband more and more insufferable. He was duped into parting with their money; he never stood up for himself, or her or their children. He was, my mother heard her once say, a waste of space.

He had to go. But there was not one reason she could give to rid herself of this dull and ineffectual man.

But, he had to go and she had to get her conservative neighbours on her side; her conservative neighbours in our conservative town where divorce was as foreign a concept as go-go dancing.

And so she accused him of molesting their daughters. And though everyone who knew Mr Baki wondered how he could rouse himself from his ennui long enough to do such a thing, the seeds of suspicion had been sown.

To this day I vacillate between yes he did, and of course he didn’t. Either way, it ruined his life.

The power of suggestion: that’s what Pravin is up against.

No matter what the result of Tuesday’s court decision, the poor man’s name has been besmirched.

In the end, if they want to get you, they will. They will stack evidence against you and crawl through mud to find things that could hurt your reputation. And there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Or maybe there is. Maybe we could stop being rhinoceroses and stand up with Pravin Gordhan and make our voices heard. If we don’t, bad triumphs over good. And we all know how that turns out.