Page 110 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 1 Issue 1 Q4

BANKING
“ e banks should be in a position to remove themselves from risky accounts, without being embroiled in the political warfare taking place around them.”
accounts, without being embroiled in the political warfare taking place around them.
e attacks on Gordhan didn’t end there. e National Prosecuting Authority has been after him for two things. Firstly, for having and running a rogue unit within SARS when he was at its head (as an aside, if you know about it, and run it, how can it be rogue? A question for another day perhaps). Investigating suspicious transactions is not a bad thing; it is what banks are required to do. If they don’t do it correctly, they get ned. Secondly, Gordhan was investigated for allowing early retirement of former SARS O cial, Ivan Pillay, with a pension of ZAR 1.2 million. A very small amount of money, especially when compared to the likes of Zuma’s accounts, or education funding shortages.
is war continued on. Vlok Symington, the Deputy Director of Law Administration at SARS, was e ectively held captive by the Chief of Police and three henchmen, or senior o cials, from the Hawks. eir aim? To force him to write an a davit that would essentially retract a memo he wrote in 2009, in which he stated that Pravin Gordhan was working within the rules of SARS, and its pension fund regulations, when he allowed Pillay to retire early. e issue became even more ridiculous when an email popped up that had been inadvertently sent to Symington, in which the Chief of Police extracted a written opinion from a SARS Lawyer, stating that, ethically, they could not force Symington to write such an a davit
In a truly telling moment, as Symington debated ownership of the email with Hawks’ Nyameka Xaba and SARS Commissioner Tom Moyane’s bodyguard, he was told, “Please sit down, we are all human”.
On the Banality of Evil
It’s an interesting turn of phrase, considering that the attacks on SARS and Pravin Gordhan himself o er up no rationale or meaning other than simple greed. Not humane, but evil. But for what purpose?
It reminded me of when I was a student at the University of Cape Town, studying under the tutelage of Prof. JM Coetzee. He had returned from lecturing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and had decided that it would not be inappropriate for Honours students studying English literature to have at least a part of their course in creative writing.
Regularly, we would submit our own writing and it would be critiqued by our colleagues. I remember very clearly discussing, at length, a rst
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