How the hell can we believe Singh?

Hand on my heart, My Lord, I am just an innocent man caught up in terrible things all because I love to practise my culture.

Hand on my heart, My Lord, this is a fire pool – because it is well-known that we people in the rural areas use buckets of water to put out fires…

Former Transnet chief financial officer Anoj Singh’s earnest professions of innocence yesterday at the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture had more than just a ring of the excuses offered up for the multimillion-rand pool at Jacob Zuma’s sprawling Nkandla homestead.

Perhaps they sound logical when composed in the head of a witness, but when we hear them, the kindest reaction would be: Oh, really?

So, in the case of Singh, we must believe the only reason he went, on multiple occasions, to the Saxonwold family mansion of the Gupta family, was for “religious and cultural” events.

The man whose company signed contracts worth billions of rands for rolling stock (where Gupta-linked companies and people raked in a fortune) swore he made no money out of the family.

And the reason he went to the Gupta company, Sahara Computers, so often? His wife worked there. Oh, really?

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