Er, but what if Kenny Kunene was telling the truth?

A day after the news broke that Kenny Kunene was shot at while driving in Norwood on Tuesday, I got a call from an old photographer colleague to ask me what I thought.

He told me all the journalists he knew had already dismissed the whole thing as a publicity stunt because, well, it’s Kenny.

I told him the vibe was much the same in my newsroom, where we worldly wise journos had managed to conclude within minutes of the news breaking that the story was not credible.

“But what if it really happened, bru?”

“Yeah. Imagine.”

Journalists are by nature a sceptical bunch, and the fact that the Sushi King appeared to have been able to count precisely “21 shots” being fired (he disputes this); that neither he nor the passenger with him were injured; that there didn’t seem to be actual holes in the BMW in the initial photos released, just “graze damage”; that none of the windows seemed to have been shot out; and that he appeared to be claiming with great confidence it was a hit on him ordered by Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa in the wake of he and his friend Steven Motale having published unflattering stories about the Buffalo Soldier … well, it all just seemed a little too convenient, and we were not convinced.

We weren’t alone. In the hours that followed it seemed the whole of South Africa jumped on the bandwagon and there was a torrent of memes and jokes, most of them comparing Kenny to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.

Sure, it was funny, providing you accepted the initial assumption that the man had staged the whole thing – and that’s a pretty big assumption to simply accept as a matter of faith and without a shred of evidence.

Nevertheless, that seems to have become the mainstream view. If you think about it, that’s pretty weird. It stops seeming so funny if you view it as millions of people laughing at the victim of a crime.

Occam’s razor tells us the simplest explanation for something is usually the correct one. To immediately accept something that is, in effect, nothing less than a fully formed conspiracy theory means we need to then also accept that Kenny either arranged to have the BMW shot at at another location earlier when he wasn’t in the car, or he trusted two shooters to keep him and a young woman safe while they emptied bullets into it – despite them being in it.

The young woman was either in on the conspiracy with Kenny or they dragged her into the whole “plot” unknowingly just to make it more believable.

Kenny would then also need all these co-conspirators to keep quiet about his elaborate plan for the rest of their lives, which we know is almost always an impossibility. He would also have opened himself up to being blackmailed by these people for the rest of his life.

Kenny may seem like the village idiot to some, but he’s not stupid. I should know; I’ve known him for 13 years.

It has since emerged through an investigation by forensic detective David Klatzow that there was a witness to corroborate the details of the shooting; the cops allegedly missed important evidence; Klatzow found more bullets in the car, including inside a tyre; the police didn’t even seem to be taking the case seriously (they allegedly assigned a junior constable as the “lead investigator”); and they sent the car to get fixed up at a panel-beating shop, allegedly with crucial evidence still unnoticed.

All of which leads to the question of … what if – shock, horror! – Kenny was telling the gospel truth all along and he really did find himself shot at by two men who jumped out of a Lexus at 8pm on Tuesday night?

The fact that these assailants didn’t kill or wound him can’t possibly be entered as evidence of the “fact” that the attempt on his life wasn’t real.

It was dark, Kenny was doing his best to be a moving target and the shooters were no doubt in a bit of an adrenaline panic. It should be no surprise they weren’t able to pull off a Jason Bourne-style shot to anyone’s head.

And, whether you like Kenny or not, that doesn’t make the mass schoolyard-style mockery that has followed acceptable in any way.

I don’t personally subscribe to Kenny’s theory that the only explanation for the shooting was that Ramaphosa either ordered the hit or that someone backing Ramaphosa now wants him dead. Any number of people could have been trying to kill Kenny (or even Steve Motale, for that matter) for any number of reasons.

There may even be the remote possibility that this was an attempted hijacking gone wrong (but I don’t believe that either, because hijackers don’t easily empty volleys of bullets into cars they are going to have to drive away with and later try to sell to someone else).

From an objective point of view, there’s far more in favour of accepting that Kenny really was shot at and was lucky to escape with his life. There’s precious little evidence available right now to come to any concrete conclusion about who was trying to kill him, or even that they were trying to kill him specifically. But there’s also more than enough evidence to say with confidence that, whoever they were, they certainly were trying to kill somebody in that car, just like Oscar Pistorius knew there was every chance he was going to kill somebody behind his bathroom door.

And if it had been anybody else driving that car, would we have seen all those jokes and memes? Imagine if the driver had been, for example, Julius Malema, and all the other circumstances of the story remained exactly the same. I’m willing to bet that, in such a case, anyone even trying to suggest the EFF leader may have been staging a publicity stunt would have been shouted down and shamed on every platform available in South Africa.

But because this thing happened to Kenny, it seems that we as a country didn’t realise the man is not actually still sitting in a Comedy Central chair for another roast session. He can’t always be fair game.

This is a guy who may genuinely nearly have been murdered in cold blood on a Johannesburg street in early September. And everywhere he now turns he encounters a hostile, mocking society that doesn’t believe him in the slightest.

That must be even worse.

Charles Cilliers, Citizen.co.za digital editor