Cricket South Africa (CSA) is a nasty organisation. It has struck a commercial deal with a tour company through which the bulk of tickets for the Newlands Test against England are being sold. The trick is that, to buy a ticket, you have to buy nights of accommodation through a tour company. The effect is to cut ordinary South African fans out of any realistic prospect of supporting their team at the ground.

When CSA was outed, including by this newspaper, it claimed it was promoting tourism. A bit of digging revealed the company in question is Tourvest, which is, in practice, controlled by businessman Robert Gumede, an ANC benefactor who has seen off a string of corruption allegations, none of which he has been convicted of, and all of which he has issued strong denials around. The most serious current matter concerns a South African Police Service COVID personal protective equipment tender. The Special Investigating Unit, an anti-corruption agency, is reportedly seeking to recover hundreds of millions of rands, alleging Gumede helped facilitate the deal that unlawfully overcharged the state. Gumede denies wrongdoing, and the matter is still before a Special Tribunal.

The whole thing stinks. If England tourists wished to support their team, they could have bought tickets and booked their own accommodation. Can you imagine the Australian cricket board selling out one of its stadiums to England ahead of the Ashes?

The standard on such things, most especially when it comes to cricket, should be Caesar’s wife. The story is that Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia after a scandal involving another man, Publius Clodius Pulcher, who allegedly disguised himself as a woman to enter a women-only religious festival held at Caesar’s house. Caesar said he did not believe Pompeia had committed adultery, but divorced her anyway because his wife had to be above suspicion. That is where the phrase “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion” comes from.

This is so much the trouble with South Africa, that few institutions are above suspicion anymore. Poor President Cyril Ramaphosa has even been ensnared now, and he was meant to be the figure who would clean up the rot. It literally cannot go higher.

While on the subject of Mr Ramaphosa, notice the irony. Jacob Zuma is set to appear in court for the 1999 arms deal corruption trial next year after almost 25 years of stalling and obfuscating, a literal Stalingrad defence. Throughout much of the quarter-century he held out, the media and civil society hounded him. Now Ramaphosa has commenced his Stalingrad defence of stalling and obfuscating, but the press is largely silent. Even in the media, the rot is tolerated.

What then of prosecutions? There are very few and none of very important people. About the most senior is former ANC MP Vincent Smith, who was sentenced in March 2026 to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including corruption, fraud, money laundering, and tax offences. Never heard of him? Exactly. He was hardly the architect of state capture, just a poor sod who was turned into a head on a stake because he had no real dirt on anyone else and could be sacrificed.

It is, in fact, an extraordinary achievement for the National Prosecuting Authority to have prosecuted so few senior politicians successfully for corruption. You would think that, just by accident, scores might have been jailed. That so few are in prison suggests that the strategy was not to prosecute them.

If it cannot go higher, how widely does it extend? Well, given the extent of corruption, and that it cannot all be hidden in settees, a lot of the loot must be passing through the banking system. Wandering albatrosses say the evidence is staggering. And banks are required to report suspicious transactions. By all accounts, they do. By one estimate, more than half the members of the ANC’s National Executive Committee are vulnerable to going to jail. If mass prosecutions had started, the whole house might have come tumbling down, and much of the Cabinet.