The government is grinding deeper into its own mire

Once it was called indentured labour. Now it’s called patriotism.

Justice Minister Ronald Lamola this week called on lawyers to do their “patriotic duty” by volunteering to be prosecutors in cases emanating from the Zondo commission. Speaking at the Law Society’s annual general meeting, Lamola said lawyers in private practice should free of charge do this work – so voluminous and exacting, the National Prosecuting Authority chief keeps telling us, that it has been unable to bring a single prosecution in three years.

Or, at the very least, at a reduced tariff. Since I wasn’t present, I don’t know whether the lawyers fawned or fell about laughing.

Some will have been reminded of an admonishment by 18th-century English man of letters Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” goes the warning.

There are worrying examples that, as the government grinds deeper into its own mire, this last-ditch ploy to get others to foot the bill is going to multiply. And the legal community is not immune to hiding behind the patriotic fig leaf.

This month, a financial company trying to set up call centres in South Africa got short shrift in the Western Cape High Court. Mukuru, the now-global financial success launched in Cape Town 18 years ago, provides an online platform for African migrants to move their money, safely and affordably, to their families back home.

That means they need staff fluent in sub-Saharan indigenous languages. But Western Cape High Court Judge Daniel Thulare has rejected their plea to employ foreigners. Instead, Thulare wants this private company to shoulder the social responsibilities that, in any other country, fall on the state.

He accepted, said Thulare, it was “necessary for their business health” for Mukuru to have mother-tongue speakers of indigenous languages spoken elsewhere on the continent.

However, Mukuru had not “uttered a single syllable” about training South Africans to speak these languages. According to Thulare, businesses should “comprehend the need to reorient themselves” and work out ways “to address the social ills of the republic. It is their social responsibility.”

So, here we have a judge who believes that a company, already paying substantial taxes, should spend vast amounts training a couple of hundred South Africans to speak – among others – Malawi’s Chewa, Yao, Tonga, Sena and Elomwe languages, as well Zimbabwe’s Shona and Ndebele.

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But Thulare is not alone in his cuckoo tree. Last week, another Western Cape High Court judge, none other than Deputy Judge President Patricia Goliath, joined him. Goliath granted an urgent interdict stopping indefinitely Amazon’s R4.5bn investment in what was supposed to be its Africa headquarters.

The interdict – favouring a Khoisan activist group and the seedy area’s civic association against the developer, the city, the provincial government, and an opposing Khoisan activist group – is to allow time for “further consultation”.

Construction must stop on a project that the City of Cape Town estimated would “provide an immediate injection of billions of rands and thousands of jobs”.

And there’s no reason for those opposing the development to speed consultation. The longer it’s stalled, the higher the costs for the developers. The developers’ best strategy here is to pay the activists a fat settlement amount to make the problem go away.

The buying-off of ersatz community groups is already the norm everywhere. But, hey, if they’re true patriots, they’ll swallow hard and take the hit.