Contagion

Dear Mr President

I have felt the  cold touch, the slimy tentacles of that bloated octopus called corruption. Just this morning, a sinister message slithered onto the screen of my cellphone: 'SanDisk Corrupted'. So it's come this far. I have tried to keep myself as pure as the Volk did in days of old but corruption now stares me impudently in the face.

In the shower, while humming a half-remembered folk song about a machine gun and briefly contemplating the meaning of life, I  wrestled with the problem.

Sir, this is now in the nature of a second pandemic. The guys in white hats are overwhelmed. The corrupt rampage like an army of orcs. Even Al Capone starts to look like a cherubic choir boy by comparison. Lately, I have been checking the household trash daily for fear that it might be stolen. I don't know if we have sufficient room to quarantine the carriers of this contagion.

Your response has to be proportionate if we hope to have a country left. I suggest a team composed of real detectives, auditors (excluding KPMG - their name is too complicated), SARS experts and reformed racketeers (set a food parcel thief to catch a food parcel thief). Clerical work and research can be done by the many people now unemployed. I'm sure that the unit would pay for itself in recoveries. Everybody leaves a paper trail, don't they? Sir, for a small consideration, I would be happy to act as a consultant. Having read lots of best-sellers on crime and espionage, you might say I've been in training for such a time as this. As the FF Plus pointed out in one of their election posters, the time has come to 'slaan terug'. After all, it's not as if these villains are the Einsteins of crime.

Yours in the struggle against suffocating corruption.

Richard