TRAINSPOTTER: Judge Dredd — will Jacob Zuma, the ANC and Siraj Desai unprotect the public?

In the South African winter of 2015, a blockbuster called Avengers: Age of Ultron was power-hosed into local cinemas, officially becoming the 11th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When the title was initially announced, it caused a huge flap in fanboy heaven, referencing as it did a supervillain that was well known to the cognoscenti. Ultron made his – more properly, its – first comic book appearance back in Marvel’s Avengers #55 (1968).

He was, it turned out, the robotic brainchild of billionaire genius Hank Pym, AKA the first Ant Man, and was coded into existence based on Pym’s own brain patterns. Following a burst of Oedipal energy, the child rebelled against the creator, and mayhem ensued.

Flash-forward 50 years, and the Age of Ultron’s filmmakers reimagined Ultron as Tony Stark/Iron Man’s programmed progeny. Stark decided, without consulting his fellow Avengers, to design a hyperintelligent bot to stand guard over the world in order to prevent future alien invasions, which can be quite devastating. Ultron, silkily voiced by James Spader, figured that in order to save humanity, humanity must first be saved from itself. The best course of action, schemed the evil metallic bastard, was to destroy the Avengers, and then wipe the planet of human vermin via a severely huge mushroom cloud.

The lesson, dear to sci-fi writers dating back to Homer at least (and yes, there is a case to be made for Homer being the proto sci-fi writer, given that he was the first to conceive of a robot), is: beware your creations. In South Africa’s twisted version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the good guys are the bad guys, the bad guys are the good guys, and everyone else is basically just insanely freaking evil, Tony Stark – a rich, spoilt billionaire with a fabulous house – is played by Jacob Zuma.

His Ultron is played to perfection by Advocate Thuli Madonsela.

Zuma faces other oedipal challenges – Julius Sello Malema primary among them – but Madonsela must be one of the more perplexing. Despite the ANC’s insistence otherwise, she is not the party’s political enemy, she is not an agent of the CIA, and she has no ostensible axe to grind with the officeholder of the presidency. Our Beloved Lady of the Legal Brief is just a deeply religious, lawyerly nerd who takes a week to read a sentence aloud, Tweets charming God-themed bumper stickerisms, and who does the one job allocated to her with uncommon resolve and efficiency.

Madonsela has not destroyed the Zuma presidency, largely because there is nothing left to destroy. But she has destroyed Zuma’s legacy. Her “Secure in Comfort” report, and the resulting Constitutional Court judgment that validated her findings, have wiped away the last shred of the president’s credibility. History will treat the dude viciously, which may seem like a small consolation, given that we still have the future to deal with.

As Zuma’s tenure draws to a close, the stakes rise: if he and his cronies don’t weasel their way into the Treasurer’s vault, if they don’t secure themselves at the front of the ANC’s feeding trough come the electoral conference in 2017 (and maybe sooner?), Zuma could end his days in penury, or worse.

Cue the action movie soundtrack, because this coincides neatly with the fact that the time has come to create an All New Amazing Public Protector. In the basement of Stark/Zuma’s computer science lab, where the rats gnaw on ancient Commodore 64 cassettes of Leisure Suit Larry and Pong, we find the beginnings of Zuma’s Ultron upgrade: the resolutely awful Judge Siraj Desai.

Make no mistake, the guy has emerged as the ANC’s frontrunner for a reason. Zuma’s two most important appointments outside of Cabinet – Madonsela as Public Protector, and Mogoeng Mogoeng as Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court – have taught the president and his court a brutal lesson. Ordinarily a superb judge of character, Zuma assumed that both Madonsela and Mogoeng were identical versions of the same model: highly devout conservative Christian legal pedants who had publicly professed that there was no authority higher than God. So far so good, because Zuma knows that a) religious nutjobs are especially easy to buy, and b) 999/1,000 people who say that they love God actually love authority, and will quickly submit to the nearest alpha.

In Madonsela and Mogoeng, the president found two examples of people who actually did believe in a higher calling. The odds were in his favour. And he lost. Twice.

He cannot afford to lose again.

* * *

The Public Protector is one of a number of Chapter Nine institutions that serve as checks and balances on a government bureaucracy so vast that it affects every last element of South African life. The framers of the Constitution surely considered the wild but not inconceivable possibility of a president-gone-rogue, a man or woman in the executive office whose primary interest was securing the world’s largest ever golden handshake. (They were, after all, Robert Mugabe’s neighbours.) But they were mostly concerned with the dull, prosaic screw-ups that are inherent in any massive bureaucracy – Minister X backs his ill-gotten Mercedes Benz into a hypo-allergenic labradoodle while totally blitzed, and now we need a report to properly censure the drunken moron. In a functioning constitutional democracy, the PP should serve as a sort of waste disposal unit, dealing with the bureaucratic effluent no one really wants to think about. Even in an imperfect universe, most South Africans should have no clue who serves in the office of the public protector, because they shouldn’t need to care.

Instead, the office has become the one thing keeping us from submitting entirely to a vast kleptocratic scam perpetrated by a governing party that operates on an endless network of patronage.

Quaintly, South Africans seem to think the recent municipal elections, which have resulted in the opposition running the bulk of the country’s metros, have changed the status quo. In some ways that’s true, but in more important ways they’ve merely amped up the urgency of those who hope to eat their fill. Perhaps the most hideous thing about Jacob Zuma’s long, pathetic reign of thievery is that he has reduced us to begging for messiahs, the most important being Thuli Madonsela’s replacement.

The God that Madonsela worships (presumably) implores us not to pray to false idols. But false idols are all we have.

Which brings us to the good judge Desai. Of all the ghastly humans that the ANC could have dredged from the judiciary to serve as their number one PP candidate, perhaps Siraj is the most successful. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the rape accusations that have dogged him since 2004. You’ll recall that Desai was accused of raping a woman named Salome Isaacs in Mumbai. Never touched her, he adamantly told the Indian police, and then later conceded to the fact that they’d – wait for it! – engaged in consensual sex. (Now this is Zuma’s kind of judge, no?) The charge was withdrawn under oath, but this doesn’t make Desai anything less a liar. Should a bullshitter – regarding something so utterly, gravely serious as sexual contact with a rape accuser – serve as Public Protector?

No. Immediate disqualification.

But, see, Judge Desai is a judge, which is a very important job that demands immense levels of integrity. But does it, really? Earlier this year, a high court of Pretoria judge named Mabel Jansen was outed on Facebook as saying – and I’m paraphrasing here – that while not all black men are rapists, all rapists are black men. So it would seem there are good judges, and there are bad judges. As it happens, Judge Desai is neither, mostly because he’s an incredibly lazy judge. He has had but 32 notable judgments in his two decades on the bench.

Should someone so unengaged with the work of the bench be tasked with the much harder graft of Publicly Protecting the Public, with up to 40,000 cases that need to be addressed every year?

No.

One would imagine that the Public Protector demands Madonsela-scale reserves of calm and coolheadedness. But Judge Desai comes off like a musclehead on a steroid binge. He flipped out last week during the second round of interviews, after he was asked about the Salome Isaacs case. Who is a judge to be grilled by mere public servants? And who among us mortals would be up to all the grilling? That time you peed on the kindergarten carpet during story time. The fistfight with your boss over the last queen prawn during the Currie Cup braai. Your untameable porn addiction. Unlike most of us, Siraj Desai and the others who accepted the PP nomination literally asked for all the scrutiny. In order to qualify for that tasty pay package and tastier pension – to say nothing of the corporate speaking engagements that follow – Desai and company submitted to the questioneering of the country’s paid representatives.

Should someone so touchy be allowed the privilege of Public Protecting?

HELL No.

And we haven’t even touched on the weird scandal involving former Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe, in which Desai became embroiled with a defamation case against a development company.

But you know what completely disqualifies Desai from the PP position? The fact that the ANC is so desperate for him to have it. They believe, just as Zuma does, that they’ve created, finally!, the perfect Ultron – a robot who won’t turn on its masters. Can Judge Desai be the perfect quisling for a president who is supposed to be number one defender of the Constitution, but is in fact the number one defiler of the Constitution?

You betcha.

Never mind Ultron, perhaps there’s a better comic book corollary lurking out there. Let’s call Desai “Judge Dredd”. And let’s make sure the only opportunity he has of getting anywhere close to the PP’s office is when he drops by for a free coffee. DM

Photo: Forgive us, Judge Dredd.