How to evade justice, SA style

Robert Mugabe clearly likes visiting South Africa – if his gushing praise of President Jacob Zuma and his government yesterday is anything to go by.

Perhaps the nonagenarian Zimbabwean president likes us because, in this country, there are seldom any consequences for major crimes.

His wife, Grace, is a good example of the South African reality that if you are powerful enough or important enough, the rules do not apply to you.

She has yet to be brought to trial here for allegedly assaulting a young woman in Johannesburg earlier this year.

Zuma himself is fighting tooth and nail to stay out of court on 783 corruption and bribery-related charges which date back more than a decade. And little has been seen of any serious probe into the mountain of allegations that his friends, the Guptas, have captured not only him, but also the state.

Mugabe, too, has never had to account for the massacres of thousands of people in Matabeleland in the 1980s, or the fact he has destroyed a once-prosperous country.

Yet there are many in South Africa who regard Mugabe as a revolutionary hero, including some in the ANC.

Millions of Zimbabweans who had to flee to South Africa, merely to survive, would disagree.