To comrade Jackie Selebi from a fellow comrade
On Monday, the 05th of December 2011, you began serving in Pretoria Maximum Prison a lengthy sentence imposed to you by the courts of our country for your involvement in criminal activities whilst you were our national police commissioner. You were tried in our public courts with all due legal processes followed. Your constitutional rights as an accused person were dully accorded to you as a citizen of our country. I therefore have no reason to doubt that you were indeed given a fair trial.
Accordingly, it would be very easy for me to condemn you as a hardened criminal as many have done, but I will not do that. I will also not hero-worship you for what you did because it was wrong and you deserve to be justly punished for it. Suffice it to say though is that, instead of totally losing respect for you, I am rather very disappointed in you. I wish you will be able to use this time to reflect and realize the error of your ways. The kind of responsibility and trust that we had bestowed upon you as a country, you should never have taken it lightly. You should have exercised more care and protected us from the clutches of the criminal underworld.
In the same spirit though, as a fellow human being and fellow comrade, I still have respect for you given your commitment and the contribution you made in bringing about the current democratic state that is in action in our country today. Ironically, it is this same democratic order for which you fought so hard, sacrificing everything, that has made sure that when you broke the law, you were punished, just like everybody else. Remember the injunction in our constitution that everyone is equal before the law.
I am also forced to wonder if you do realize the corrosive and corruptive power of the capitalist system in making you the antithesis of that for which you fought so hard to achieve - a democratic and clean governance where the needs of our people are paramount in your daily work. I hope you have learnt (or should I say re-learnt) the lesson that in your efforts to change any historical phenomenon, that same phenomenon also changes you. The trick is to carefully manage the proportionality of the change between you and that phenomenon, so that you don't find yourself crossing the line to the other side.
I further wish to salute you though, for not organizing storm troopers to derail our constitutional order when it was clear that you were going to jail. I also like the fact that there was no political frenzy as you were taken to Pretoria Maximum Prison.