Detail

• Artist: Francois Smit
• Published in: The Sunday Independent
• Author of article: Jeremy Gordin
• Date: 12/11/2006

• Paper: 280gsm 100% cotton acid free paper
• Ink: Epson ultrachrome archival pigment ink
• Image Size (printarea): 594mm x 420mm
• Frame: Optional
• Edition: Limited edition of 12

A short extract from the article

Optimism, political commitment and personal allegiances blinded Shaik to the writing on the wall.
On Monday morning, Schabir Shaik's brothers, relatives, attorney and friends sat, grim-faced and almost frozen with disconsolate, on the sunny stoep of a Cape Town hotel.
"C'mon," Shaik said quietly, "think about all those people who are really sick or dying – this is not the end of the world."
The group had just listened, inside the hotel, on a hastily -borrowed radio, to the judgment summary delivered in Bloemfontein by Judge Craig Howie, president of the supreme court of appeal (SCA).
Before Howie had started reading, Reeves Parsee [COR], Shaik's attorney, had scribbled a quick list on a piece of paper – count one, appeal upheld/dismissed, count two, appeal upheld/dismissed�, and so on. As Howie read, each tick that Parsee made next to each “dismissed� seemed like another blow of an axe on a condemned man’s neck.
Howie had dismissed all of Shaik’s appeals, except a minor one related to one aspect of the asset forfeiture case against him and his 10 companies. He had also upheld the 15-year sentence given in June last year to Shaik by Judge Hillary Squires in the Durban high court on two counts of corruption and one of fraud.
Shaik did not listen to the broadcast. Instead he went for a walk in the hotel’s lush garden, carrying his prayer beads. Yet when Shaik was told the news by Yunis, his younger brother, he appeared calmer than the others.
He even cracked a couple of Shaik-style jokes: “The prisoners better watch out. The new Hannibal Lecter is coming to town,� he quipped.
He then quietly agreed with Yunis and Mo, a second younger brother, that it sounded as though the judgment was not going to allow for a constitutional court appeal; that he therefore needed to get back as fast as possible to his family in Durban; and that Mo and Yunis should deal with a press conference at a Cape radio station.
Back in Durban on Monday night, the brothers decided on what Mo called “a media shutdown�. “This is no time for spin or rationalisations or being a victim, or any of that bullshit,� Yunis said. Schabir spent Tuesday and Wednesday at his home putting the final touches to arrangements related to his businesses but mainly to his wife, Zuleika, and infant son, Yasir [COR].
His lawyers were still looking for issues in the SCA judgment that might enable them to appeal to the constitutional court. But Shaik said he was “at peace� – there needed to be “closure�, not vain hope, he said – and he remained calm and controlled.
Even minutes before he “turned himself in� at the Durban high court on Thursday morning, looking unusually diminutive and frail in a white t-shirt, he apologised to those reporters to whom he had given “a hard time� during his trial. . .

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