Publication	Sunday Independent
Date	2005-11-27
Reporter	Karen Bliksem
Web Link	www.sundayindependent.co.za

Exciting news - just in, as we say in this business - is that Vusi "Pixie" Pikoli, the learned chief of the National Prosecuting Authority, and some of his merry men have spent the last three days or so on the isle of Mauritius.

My Mauritian deep throat called me the minute they touched down at the airport. She (my deep throat, that is) believes they travelled there either to find a matching DNA profile in connection with a certain alleged rape complaint, or in search of a certain Superintendent Dharmendra Jugoo *1.

Readers do, I hope, recall Jugoo. The former Mauritian policeman is the person whose name, despite his demise, keeps appearing on witness lists, first in connection with Schabir Shaik, the Durban entrepreneur, and second, appended to the indictment served this month on a more famous person.

I don't want to mention this person's name, for reasons that I will explain below. But, if, like me, patience is not your strongest point, I will explain now:

I am terrified that Colleen Lowe Morna, whom I fondly think of as Colleen Lawn Mower, and various other Furies of the women's struggle will come after me with their cleavers (or their cleavages, such as those might be). The reason this could happen is that they are incensed with the naming of certain names in connection with a certain alleged rape complaint.

But - to revert to my Mauritian deep throat - I think she is talking through her Wonderbra (R), and I think, too, that her belief that the NPA bigwigs went to the glorious isle for the purpose of, among other things, "really giving it to the media" is also arrant nonsense.

However, talking of "giving it to the media" ... Eish. During the last week everyone has been squawking "much better", as they say, about the newspaper coverage of the unmentionable rape complaint, especially the coverage offered by this esteemed newspaper and its two sisters, The Sunday Tribune and The Sunday Argus.

So much malevolence, so much inaccuracy, so much ignorance! So let me start, like Pol Pot of blessed memory, with a small re-education campaign.

The three newspapers, Indy, Trib and Argie, belong to the same newspaper group. Got it, fellers? This means they share resources - that is, knowledge, technology, people (provided one is willing to concede that journalists are people), and, yes, good heavens, stories. This process is called, if one wants to sound like a management twit, synergy.

Anyway, the Sunday Times kicked off its 16 days of whining campaign by fantasising that the editor of this publication was forced on November 12 to sneak into the bowels of the earth, where the presses are shared with the Times, to read its pearls of wisdom and then to rush upstairs to change the front page, so as to match the Times.

First of all, Sauer Street has lifts (aka elevators), though I concede they don't work too often or too well. More to the point, no one at the Indy, least of all any of its editors, has ever "rushed" anywhere since 1995.

Then Peter Bruce, the thick end of journalism - I mean the thick end of the wedge (the name of his column in Business Day) - having also rushed forward with the story about the mysterious editor traversing stairs, found it questionable that the complainant's phone number was given to the Indy reporter by people in "the [no-name] camp".

Personally I thought it pretty damn enterprising of the reporter to have found the number in that particular cluster of tents - where better after all?

What no one seems to have noticed - and about which the Times of course kept mum - was that the Times also had the number! The problem for the Times, however, was that, at that stage of the saga, the alleged complainant was not a complainant at all. Au contraire, she did not want the story in the public domain, something that the Times obviously did not want to mention.

At any rate, she later changed her mind, and this week the aforementioned Lawn Mower wrote thus: "One Sunday newspaper that, by its own admission, got [the alleged complainant's] name and number from the Zuma camp, fell right into the trap of not only publishing [her] denial but naming the victim [sic]. [However,] ... the accuser [sic] has [now] stood her ground, leaving the newspaper in a somewhat embarrassing position."

Madam, Ms, whatever, the only person in an embarrassing position or trap is ol' no-name. More importantly, did it ever occur to you, Ms Lawn Mower, that there exist some people who actually simply talk to other people (they don't label them victims, accusers or anything else) and also, unlike the Sunday Times (for example), they ask those other people for their permission to do certain things.

Could it have been - since at that point the complainant said there was no rape and no complaint - that the complainant gave her permission to be named and even asked that her denial be published?

Which brings us to the learned Lisa Vetten, the head of the gender programme [what?] at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, who violently and inaccurately opined this week that: "We're living in a time when women are rewarded far more for their sexuality than for their intellect."

As my granny used to say: Honey bunch, you should be so lucky. *2

Another important question is why Superintendent Jugoo crossed over to the other side in the first place.

*2      Ouch.