When the book, "Great South Africans", (based on the BBC TV series which told the stories of 100 great South Africans), was released in 2004, I was deeply disappointed that Jackie Selebi was not included among these 100 great South Africans, who included an apartheid architect and our fore-fathering paleontological human skull, Ms Ples.

Today I am deeply ashamed to say that I suspect that were the BBC to do follow-up TV series on a list of 100 Worst South Africans, Jackie Selebi could easily win himself a place on such a list of national ignominy, because of his conviction for corruption.

In a recent Pretoria News column, the former Minister of Science and Technology, Mogobudi Mangena, showed tremendous political and intellectual courage by calling upon South Africans to consider whether it is not the right thing to show mercy to the seriously ill Jackie Selebi and give him a pardon for his crime. I find the former Science and Technology Minister's public call interesting, since he remains a loyal member and senior leader of AZAPO, and not of the ANC, Jackie Selebi's long-time political home.

It is of no little political interest to note that, to date, there is no major ANC and government leader who has publicly supported former Minister Mangena's mercy call.

They should. For my part, I strongly support this brave public call. But unlike the former Minister, I happen to be swayed by my emotions and a great pity for Selebi on this matter, which comes from my very close interaction with him over a long time encompassing over three decades, as a former ANC exile, and subsequently as the SA storied international diplomat. I am therefore really not totally dispassionate, or disinterested, in the matter.

I shall now write about Jackie Selebi the ANC exile and post-apartheid SA's great diplomat that I got to know. The last time I interacted with Jackie Selebi was when he served his last days as Foreign Affairs Director General in September 1999. So all the memories I carry with me of Jackie Selebi are fond, warm, uplifting and inspirational, because they are about Selebi before he joined SAPS and before he succumbed to Lucifer's temptations.

I thank God the Almighty that I did not join him when he moved from Foreign Affairs to SAPS. There, but for the Grace of God, go I.

But who was Ambassador Jackie Selebi? The best testimonial for Jackie Selebi in all his life was written for him by our democratically elected National Parliament on Wednesday, 18 March 1998. The Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Assembly that sat that day reads:

"6. Mr T. S Yengeni moved without notice:

That the House -

(1) Noting with pleasure the recent unanimous election during the opening of the 54th session of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva of a former member of this House Mr Jackie Selebi - South Africa's ambassador to the United Nations - as chairperson of the commission.

(2) believing that the election of Mr Selebi is a fitting tribute and acknowledgement of the sterling role that Mr Selebi has played in fighting for the implementation of the UN Chemical Weapons convention and his leading role in the ongoing international campaign for the banning of the production and use of landmines; and

(3) believing that Mr Selebi's election is an important victory for and acknowledgement of South Africa's role in promoting a human rights culture in South Africa and the world.

therefore congratulates Mr Jackie Selebi on his noble endeavours and his election to the prestigious position in the United Nations.

Agreed to."

Four months later the Sowetan of 24 July 1998, under the heading "Selebi Gets Human Rights Award", reported that Selebi had been awarded International Service for Human Rights annual human rights prize. As the Sowetan put it, "the prize came in recognition of Selebi's highly respected chairmanship of the 54th session of the UN's Commission on Human Rights and the 1997 Oslo diplomatic conference which resulted in the banning of anti-personnel land mines."

So how did it come about that Jackie Selebi, the great diplomat, was praised profusely by our National Assembly in 1998, and that Jackie Selebi the criminally corrupted head of the SAPS was sentenced by our courts to serve a jail term in 2010, following a judgement that was as scathing as the parliamentary motion was full of praise?

In a recent Pretoria News article on Jackie Selebi, immediately following the reconfirmation of his conviction by the Supreme Court of Apppeal, Abbey Makoe wrote an emotional piece in the Pretoria News which sought to blame former President Thabo Mbeki for redeploying Selebi from his position as Director General of Foreign Affairs and appointing him instead as National Police Commissioner of the SAPS, thus putting him, so to speak, on the road to perdition.

I suspect the matter is much more complicated than the analysis Abbey Makoe provided. Here is one possible explanation of the kind of pressures former president Thabo Mbeki might have come under to move Jackie Selebi from Foreign Affairs to SAPS.

In his article, "Foreign Policy and the Mbeki Era: Faranani?", Greg Mills writes: "In spite of the positive image generated as a result of the energy she displayed in trying to secure a peace settlement in the Congo, early in her term there were reports of great unhappiness in the ranks over the role played by Foreign Minister Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. Her management style and attitude led to her falling out with Jackie Selebi." ("The Wired World: South Africa, Foreign Policy and Globalisation", page 335).

When a new Minister did not get along with a sitting Director General, in such an ego spat, former President Mbeki often, if not always, sacrificed the Director General, making him or her to walk the plank, and thus retaining a new Minister.

So it was with Jackie Selebi in September 1999, who was made to make room for a new Minister and was shafted to the Police. As the Mail & Guardian's Howard Barrel put it in an October 1999 article, "now just 17 months and a Departmental revolution later, Selebi is headed for the police, where he is tipped to succeed George Fivaz as commissioner".

I first met Jackie Selebi in the late 1980 when we were both new ANC political exiles in Matola, a suburb of Maputo, Mozambique. In the early 1980s, when I was an ANC university student in Moscow, I met Jackie many times during his Moscow transits from Budapest, where he was based as an exiled ANC Youth League Representative to the World Federation of Democratic Youth and Students (WFDYS), en route to the ANC Headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia.

In the mid 1980s, I reported to him when he served as the ANC Youth League leader in exile, and when I served for several years as the Head of the ANC Student Union in the Soviet Union. We thus got to know each other in exile pretty well. We subsequently worked closely when he was our first black Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, and I was a junior diplomat at our Mission at the United Nations in New York.

In 1997 Jackie arranged for my diplomatic transfer from our New York UN Mission to his Geneva UN Mission. I worked closely under him in this capacity until his appointment by former President Mbeki back to the Foreign Affairs Head Office in Pretoria, where he became the country's first black Director General for Foreign Affairs.

Soon I followed him from Geneva to Pretoria and joined his Foreign Affairs DG Office, where he tasked me to be his speech-writer, and also to set up the Foreign Affairs Policy Unit within his Office. Jackie Selebi's unbelievable rise from being an improbable ANC exiled revolutionary in late 1980 - a former Soweto teacher, obese, with a penchant for self-deprecating jokes, fierce temper of a provoked African mamba, deep and hearty laughter, intemperate and coarse language of an Odessa sailor, hangman's decisiveness and determination, a great heart, and a very forgiving disposition, but also too trusting of human beings, whatever their background - to the very pinnacle of domestic and international diplomacy as our Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Foreign Affairs DG, Chairman of the UN Commission for Human Rights, and other international accolades, is still unparalleled in post-apartheid SA's diplomacy.

Jackie Selebi was truly a unique diplomatic triumph and a multilateralist par excellence. So successful was he as a diplomat that he was on a first-name terms with several Heads of State and Government around the world. He was on the first name terms with such distinguished and illustrious international diplomatic personalities as then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, Ireland's former President and UNHRC Mary Robinson, the Arab League Secretary General Moussa, Britain's Lady Dianna on combating land-mines, and the World Economic Forum's Klaus Schwab.

Alongside former Presidents Nelson Mandela and  Thabo Mbeki, former Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo, and the ever intellectually animated and socially  irrepressible former Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad, Selebi was at the forefront of re-integration of South Africa back into the fold of community of nations following the end of apartheid in 1994.

He was also at the forefront of the international community's sterling efforts to develop post-Cold War normative standards in such diverse diplomatic fields as human rights, nuclear disarmament, conventional chemical weapons, anti-landmines treaty, WTO negotiations, WEF annual Davos meetings, and Geneva-based WIPO's intellectual property protection efforts.

Jackie Selebi was SA diplomatic pioneer of great note, and arguably post-apartheid South Africa's most successful multilateral diplomat so far. But even in his exile and diplomatic halcyon days, there was something about Selebi that made him seem like a bad accident waiting to happen, something that made him forever appear like one of those deeply flawed but transformational heroes from Thomas Carlyle's "On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History." 

As Thomas Carlyle would say about his Heroes, "their heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of difficulties, not in their moral perfection".

So it was with Selebi - impetuous, explosive temper, intimidating, his ability to bear long grudges, his propensity to think and make decisions on his feet, his tendency to cultivate a close-knit but exclusionary circle of absolutely trusted confidants, and his flashes of typical school ground bully tactics - all these weaknesses on Selebi's part were often on display, and were part of his legend since I got to know him in Maputo exile in 1980. 

That today Selebi is an imprisoned man, ill, down and out, as well as thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the whole world, is a heart-breaking and stupendous fall from grace.

That is why it is so hard for those of us who knew him intimately to believe and accept that the fall from grace of the former amateur Soweto pugilist has been this total and definite. 

This is such a stark and striking contrast from the diplomatic macho-man depicted by Business Day's Stephen Laufer, in an article entitled "SA's new foreign affairs director-general respected by colleagues for his competent and fair handling of difficult meetings." As Laufer wrote: "Try as one may it is virtually impossible to find anyone anywhere who will be really critical of Jackie Selebi, SA's newly appointed director-general of foreign affairs..."

Now try as one may, it is virtually impossible to find anyone anywhere, especially in South Africa and within the current Jacob Zuma-led ANC, who will be really full of praise for Jackie Selebi's tremendous contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle and his immortalised contribution to post-apartheid SA society at the diplomatic level.

As George Nene, one of Selebi's life-long friends, recently indicated in an interview with Abbey Makoe, to this day the UN Reforms that Selebi initiated during his diplomatic stint at the UN in Geneva are still referred to fondly by international diplomats as "the Selebi Reforms."

Jackie Selebi's imprisonment is a massive victory for the fight against corruption and criminality in our land, and a thundering constitutional affirmation of the rule of, and equality before, the law in our new constitutional and democratic State. But lest we forget, Selebi's imprisonment deprives our diplomacy permanently of one of its most inspirational, pioneering, dynamic and deep-thinking multilateral diplomatic practitioners since the end of Apartheid.

If for nothing else, for that reason alone, Jackie Selebi's imprisonment should be an occasion for collective national sadness and deep self-reflection.

Jackie Selebi is unfortunately now our prime example of why Thomas Carlyle so passionately and deeply believed in his flawed Heroes - because his genius made Thomas Carlyle understand that the reason his Heroes could not attain moral perfection was that the world itself is so full of contradictions. 

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi is Executive Director of the Centre of Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA)

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