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Although Pallo Jordan has confessed to his deadly sins, politics will never be the same again. I commend him for apologising to the nation for his wrongdoings.
With his brilliant intellectual prowess, there was no need for him to ‘doctor’ his capacities.
If you gave a politician a truth serum and asked him what he did for a living, he would quote Tolstoy: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me and assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all possible means, except by getting off his back!”
If you gave truth serum to those who vote for our politicians and ask them why they vote as they do, they would quote Frederic Bastiat who described government as: “That great fiction by which everyone tries to love at the expense of everyone else.”
Ambrose Beirce defined politics as: “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage”. John Dryden poetized: “In friendship false, implacable in hate, resolved to ruin or rule the state”
In a democratic age, with people stupefied by television, with myths in place of facts and ideology in places of moral ideas, politics necessarily becomes a competition in mass corruption, with each party attempting to win public support by avoiding or twisting the truth in accordance with plausible and serviceable fictions. Under such a regime, honesty is inconvenient.
Pallo Jordan was hailed as an uncommon kind of politician and garlanded for his supposed stick of integrity.
His exposure will rock the political landscape of South Africa. Many of us will miss his supreme intellect.
He was and will remain, the most polished intellectual ion post-apartheid South Africa.
