• Are you a top public servant or politician who occasionally receives wads of cash in excess of R5 000 in unmarked brown envelopes as payment for work done after hours?
• Do you sometimes prefer to do business in a gentleman’s club?
• Are any of your close friends a renowned drug trafficker? Have you, from time to time, found yourself at your kids’ school, at fee-paying time - without your wallet, and were you bailed out by a long-time struggle friend who asks no more in return than a quiet word in support of his associate’s bid to procure arms for the state?

If any of these scenarios seem overly familiar to you, you may soon find yourself in a spot of bother. South Africa’s top crime-fighters, seem to be obsessed with hounding otherwise-upstanding public servants who have committed only the occasional indiscretion in their shining careers.

Not only that, but they have made a habit of pressing multiple charges at the most inconvenient of times. But fear not why not follow the lead of other recent high-profile victims of the manipulation of state institutions for political ends?
For your easy reference, here is a check list of the top five legal (and not-so-legal) defence strategies you may want to try:

1. Before the bastards get you to court, bring your own counter-action in a higher court. In your application, it may benefit you to highlight the negative impact on service delivery, fixed investment and the South African trade deficit which your incarceration would have (not to mention the impact on the livelihoods of your four wives and 24 children).
2. Have yourself elected president of the ruling party and pass a motion at the party congress to have the nasty (stinging) cops dismissed, dissolved, castrated, sanitised and generally cut off and cast out. Just make sure that you can neutralise their sting before the date on which you are due to appear in court.
3. Arrange for the main prosecutor in the case against you to be arrested and charged himself. If possible, he should be charged with very similar offences to those with which he has charged you.
4. After being elected president of the ruling party, establish a broad front of convicted fraudsters and other politicians with dubious records, just to show that you are no worse than many other people in power and that convicting you and all your friends will leave no-one to run the country.
5. If all else fails, you may try suggesting that the whole affair is tribal in nature and based on a misunderstanding dating back to the 19th century when the colonialists turned kings into collaborators in their efforts to divide and rule. This last tactic is high-risk, especially if the acting head of the stinging police happens to come from the same village as your own grandmother, so check this out first.

If you try all of these approaches and nothing works, I’m afraid you may have to serve a lengthy jail term. Then innumerable so-called “liberal”‘ analysts are bound to waste kilometres of newsprint claiming that your conviction is an important milestone in South Africa’s democracy and that your failure to beat the system is proof that our judiciary and our democratic institutions are not open to cynical manipulation.
They may even argue that your demise has been of symbolic importance in helping South Africa to transcend a very difficult period in its history, in which an over-centralised ruling party, increasingly dominated by an small out-of-touch elite, has become highly prone to opportunism and factionalism, and is in danger of losing sight of its broader goal of transforming our society for the benefit of all.

But don’t concern yourself with this nonsense. Call in a few favours, and you’ll be out on parole in a month or two.