Sport, Greed and Betrayal: an Interview with Graham Joffe

CW Team | 3:37am BST 12 September 2020

The former CNN International Correspondent speaks to CricketWeb about his new book and the challenges of investigative sports journalism in the Twenty-First Century

Cricket Web: I suppose I should start with my earliest memories of you, which are of groaning every morning at your “Stupid Sports Joke of the Day” on FM radio. You were a pioneer of the sort of cringe comedy that made Ricky Gervais and Steve Carrell their fortunes. So I’m delighted to see that Sport: Greed & Betrayal is chock-full of dad jokes. On successive pages:

• “Looks like the hockey girls got the short end of the stick!” – p. 48
• “The president of SASCOC, Mr Gideon Sam is a trustee of the Thoroughbred Horse Racing Trust. But believe you me, there’s no ‘horsing’ around when it comes to the salaries of some SASCOC officials.” – p. 47

I had this history very much in mind when I reached the chapter in which you recount a meeting with George Rautenbach, a major figure in what you call “the South African Sports Mafia.” He asks you at one at one point, “What happened to the old Joffers everyone used to love?” Although he posed it for cynical, gaslighting reasons, this seems to me a very good question. The transition from “Joffers my Boy” to “Graeme Joffe, Muck-Raker,” is a pretty radical one. Perhaps you’d care to tell us how it about?

Graeme Joffe: Good question. And it’s true. I really was the happy-go-lucky “Joffers” on 94.7. Jeremy Mansfield created that persona for me; he helped us all to create our own on-air personas. And “Joffers My Boy” became kind of a household name in South Africa—the guy who did the sports bulletins and did the terrible sports joke at 08:30 every morning. And yeah, I loved it. I used to build it up, to make as though every day’s joke was the best joke ever. I guess people used to laugh more at me laughing than at the joke itself, which was always terrible. I don’t think there was ever a good one.

But you know, I was always a sports journalist first, having worked at CNN for seven years as an international sports anchor. Journalism was my passion, and I was never going to be a comedian; that’s for sure. It was purely by default that I got into investigative sports journalism. It came about in 2012. I had gone out on my own, and was doing my own show called Sports Fire on Radio Today, and at about that time there was a huge controversy between the Lions and the EP Kings, two South African rugby franchises: Who was going to be promoted to, and who would be relegated from, the Super Rugby league? SA Rugby (SARU) had done them both a huge disservice, because there was no promotion/relegation system.

And there were some very strange media coming out of Cape Town. Highbury Safika Media (HSM)—Mark Keohane and his buddies, through SA Rugby magazine—were pushing the agenda of the EP Kings, and I couldn’t understand it: How could you want the Kings to get into Super Rugby when they weren’t even in the top tier of the Currie Cup, South Africa’s domestic league? On poking around a little, I discovered that Keohane was an unaccredited agent for Luke Watson, the Kings captain. If the Kings got into Super Rugby, Luke Watson would make more money, and Mark Keohane would make more money. Ha!

He did not divulge his conflict of interest to the rugby public, but he pushed the agenda via his media empire. It was just extraordinary that he could be doing this kind of stuff under the guise of journalism. No objectivity whatsoever. I asked him what was going on. He (and his cronies) responded by trying to blackmail me on Twitter: “Oi, Joffers! Tell everyone why you left CNN…” They were just diverting from the real issue, of course.

Then I dug a little bit deeper, and found out that Keohane was also the spokesperson for the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (SASCOC), and that HSM was getting paid millions for PR work—in consequence of a so-called “tender”. In fact, the contract had never gone to tender; it had just been handed to them. SASCOC President Gideon Sam lied about this. Keohane lied about it. I had them to rights. And it all developed from there. It turned into a bit of a soap opera. People started going, “Joffers, this is unbelievable! Finally there’s someone who wants to stand up and speak out for the athletes and what’s going on in South African sport.” As you know, there’s little to no culture of investigative sports journalism in South Africa, sadly.

So I started out as this lone crusader, and it became a pure addiction. I loved it. I loved the digging, the hunt. It changes your whole life. It turns your life upside down. There is the danger of being consumed by negativity, of course, but I couldn’t sit on the information. Coaches, administrators, athletes—anyone who had been treated unfairly or who knew something—were trusting me to put that information forward. I had to make sure that it got out there, and I carried on reporting without fear or favour. It snowballed from there.

HSM is a fascinating entity: a PR machine masquerading as independent journalists. Could you spill a bit more tea on Keohane and his other conflicts of interest? He used to pose as something of a whistleblower himself. I have a vague memory—way back in the early-to-mid-2000s—of his being held up as a brave voice in the wilderness, much as you are today.

Exactly. When it suited him, for his personal agenda and his personal gain, he loved that kind of thing. It’s all about him. It started with “Kamp Staaldraad,” that infamous boot camp set up for the South African national rugby team ahead of the 2003 World Cup. He made as though he was the big whistleblower there, when in fact it was a guy called Dale McDermott who really put his neck on the line. I feel there’s no place for these kinds of guys in South African sports journalism. It’s incredible how he’s infiltrated the systems. HSM has a lot to answer for.

I remember when I first became aware of them. It would have been the early 2000s, when two major South African cricket magazines hit the shelves almost simultaneously. There was The Wisden Cricketer, and there was SA Cricket magazine. I think it speaks rather poorly of the South African reading public that the latter won out. The thing is barely readable: twenty pages of advertisements, fifteen of full-page photographs; and what little prose there is tends to be a near-paraphrase of the work of others. The only guy worth reading on their staff was Tom Eaton, who seems since his days on The Mail & Guardian to have made a career of elevating the trash around him. He does that for Business Day now.

True. On that point, by the way—SA Rugby and SA Cricket—it’s a very interesting thing. How’d they even came to own SA Rugby, which is typically a SARU brand? There are no royalties paid over to SARU—or are there? That strikes me as an important question. I never got any answers when I inquired into it. But it is suggestive that they were using SARU sponsors in the magazine…

I guess it all works out. One hand washes the other. You’re never going to criticise the system when you’re so entangled with it. Just the other day we saw Keohane coming out with this beautiful glossy piece about how incredible, how noble, how brilliant Mark Alexander and Jurie Roux (Deputy President and CEO respectively) are at SARU…

I know that SA Cricket, too, has a cosy relationship with the powers that be. One even finds the likes of JP Duminy and other Proteas players sitting on their editorial board.

Excerpt from Issue 129 of SACricket Magazine, showing JP Duminy on the editorial board at HSM 

How can you cover these guys objectively and critically if they’re on your team?

Ryan Vrede, Keohane’s lapdog, is now the editor of SA Cricket. He, together with Keohane, was instrumental in creating an anonymous website on a server in Panama to defame and discredit me. I’d been exposing them week after week, with all their lies and all their dirt, so what’s the best thing to do? Try to discredit Graham Joffe. They tried everything. I mean, to be honest, I just … [sighs] … I find them to be disgusting individuals.

And you’re satisfied at this point that Vrede is the man behind that website?

Two forensic linguists arrived independently at that conclusion: Colin Michell from the Faculty of General Education Programme at the Fujairah Women’s College, and Isabel Picornell, PhD, CFE, from QED Limited. I had already been told by insiders at HSM that Vrede was one of the authors. But to get it confirmed by professionals is always nice—as I did with any other story or lead. I always made sure that my source wasn’t just a disgruntled individual. I always backed my intelligence up with two or three others, just to make sure that the facts were correct.

Let’s move on to a question you’ve probably been asked a million times (and therefore presumably answered a million times), but maybe you’d oblige us once more: the story of your battle with SASCOC and your exile from South Africa.

Sure. The SASCOC stuff started in about 2012, when I figured out that Keohane was the spokesperson, and that HSM had landed this multi-million-Rand contract without its ever having gone to tender. I reported this, and everything started to explode from there. I had athletes, coaches and administrators confiding in me, telling me about what was going on. Within SASCOC itself I had whistleblowers—they used aliases, of course—and I used to read the emails from athletes in particular, and almost have tears rolling down my face, thinking, How can this be happening to South Africa’s top athletes?

SASCOC was just filthy with corruption. Sam Ramsamy, who is the pioneer of the Olympic movement in South Africa, was still running the roost. He’d been good friends for a long time with Tubby Reddy, the CEO, who was now running SASCOC like his own private business. No-one could touch him. Gideon Sam, the president, became a puppet. Reddy and the CFO, Vinesh Maharaj, were doing as they pleased with the resources. SASCOC is the biggest beneficiary of National Lottery funding; no athlete in South Africa should ever be short of funds. But it’s just amazing, in the last ten years, how many sporting federations have gone bankrupt, and how many athletes have had to pay their own way to represent their country.

I mean, how can you transform South African sport in these conditions? How does an athlete from the rural areas or township become a top South African sportsperson if he or she is picked not on merit, but only because he or she has the needful financial resources. I’m not talking about the major three or four sporting federations, like soccer, cricket and rugby—they have sponsors—but smaller federations like swimming, track and field, and cycling, where the athletes have to pay their own way even for kit. If you’ve got to pay R30,000 out of your own pocket to represent South Africa at an international meet, how is it possible to transform the sport and get more people involved? It’s sickening.

Again, the money was there. The problem was that a big percentage of the funding that SASCOC got from the Lottery was used to enrich themselves: business-travel vacations, dinners, birthday parties—it was frightening what was going on.

What’s extraordinary is how blatantly wrong it is. At one point you cite a provision in the Olympic Charter which stipulates, quite clearly, that bodies like SASCOC aren’t allowed to pay salaries to their administrators:

This you juxtapose with a screenshot of a page from SASCOC’s accounts. And under the heading “Salaries,” you see all these administrators getting paid six-figure fees:

Yes. In direct contravention of the IOC charter. They say, “No! No! No! They’re not they’re not ‘salaries.’ They’re ‘remuneration for travel’ and stuff like that.” But some of the expenses numbers are identical, so the person who travels from Jo’burg or Cape Town—you mean to tell me that they’ve had the exactly the same expenses, to the cent? The problem is that you’ve got more dictators involved in South African sport than leaders. These guys have prioritised self-enrichment ahead of the athletes. They’re these big-boys clubs that you just can’t get out of power. They stay there as long as they can, until there’s a fallout over money. No honour among thieves.

Tubby Reddy and Vinesh Maharaj were eventually fired from the organisation three or four years ago, but it was incredible the amount of graft they got done before their ouster. Tenders—that’s the easiest way for people to get money out of these organisations. Kind of like Fikile Mbalula did with the R70-million SA Sports Awards: His friends got the tenders. It’s laughable what goes on.

Indeed it is! From a comedy point of view, the Sports Awards are worth every cent…

Oh my god, you’re so right! I used to cringe. Of course, when I started in investigative journalism, I instantly became persona non grata at these evenings. It was quite sad. I used to do the Lions cricket dinners, the Lions rugby dinners, etc. And I did them for nothing, because I just loved it, and I felt it was a good way of giving back. But then I got backlisted. No-one wants to be seen to be close to a whistleblower, especially not in South African sport. But it didn’t matter. I was addicted. I was going to finish the job that I had started, and I didn’t care. I was going to report without fear or favour. As a journalist, you’ve got to have your ethics and integrity. It was as simple as that.

But it got deep, you know. SASCOC sued me for defamation, for R21.1 million, in my personal capacity. I was writing for News24 and The Citizen at the time, but they sued me in my personal capacity.

It should be said that News24 is a subsidiary of Naspers, one of the biggest media organisations in the world, with some of the deepest pockets. A minor disgrace—well, a major disgrace actually—that they didn’t come to your aid, given that they were publishing the supposedly defamatory material…

Well, it was all conflicted. The driving force behind the lawsuit was Keohane. He used to fly to Jo’burg and meet with a top media lawyer at Webber Wentzel. It’s really so sad: Dario Milo, who ostensibly fights for media freedom, was now representing SASCOC against a journalist. How that happened I still, to this day, don’t know

So they sued me for R21.1 million. Naspers said they wouldn’t help me because I wasn’t a full-time employee. It didn’t bother me, to be honest. But obviously SASCOC wanted to bully me, to cripple me financially, and to discredit me, for the purpose of scaring off all other sports journalists: “Look what we’ve done to Graeme Joffe. This will happen to you if you start digging.” It sent out a message to a lot of people.

It was such a malicious lawsuit. It was absolutely pathetic. It hung over my head for four years, which really was so unfair.

Just as an example of the sort of thing they regarded as “defamatory,” you sent out a tweet on March 24, 2013: “Great news re: @Mugg_and_Bean sponsorship of SA men’s hockey. Just hope SASCOC don’t (get) their ‘grubby/tubby’ paws on any of the money.” The damages claimed on that one alone were R500,000. To be defaming someone, of course, you have to be making a factually incorrect claim about them. You can’t defame someone with a “hope.” I, for example, may “hope” that my next-door neighbour doesn’t commit murder. This seems a reasonable hope to have.

It made legal history. I was the first person in South Africa ever to be sued for a tweet. They’re a sick bunch, and they’re well protected at government level. A lot of these presidents and CEOs have political ambitions, or are linked to government. They become untouchables. There’s also the auditors, who turn a blind eye to a lot of the corruption. Eventually they, too, got sick and tired of me. They didn’t want to answer my questions. South African sport is in the grips of something systemic: a cancer of corruption, nepotism and maladministration. It’s ugly.

Lest anyone think that the behaviour you’ve described isn’t bad enough to warrant your description of these people as the “South African Sports Mafia,” perhaps you’d like to tell us about how you were hounded out of the country.

Well, there was no federation that I wasn’t going to dig into if I got information. It started with the Olympic committee, and then it just filtered down into the various federations. What happens is that, right at the top, you’ve got the Department of Sports and Recreation, which is corrupt; then a little lower down you’ve got SASCO, which is corrupt; and, you know, if No. 1’s corrupt, it allows everybody underneath to think that they’re entitled to do the same. And there’s no watchdog.

Anyway, I carried on digging and digging until things started getting very ugly for me. George Rautenbach from Megapro—you mentioned him earlier—paid a company to follow me and illegally to tap my phone. (I’ve got the invoices for this, which are also in the book.) And I started getting some strange phone calls. I started getting visits at my apartment in Morningside. And HSM created that anonymous website on a server in Panama. And I just—I started feeling very uncomfortable in Johannesburg. My health was starting to get away from me. I didn’t want to go out at night. I was looking over my shoulder the whole time. And so I decided at the end of 2014, just to get away from the heat, to move back to Grahamstown—

Just as I was leaving Grahamstown, incidentally. We might have bumped into each other about six years ago with a bit more luck!

I’m sorry I missed you! What a great place! Great times.

But yeah, what happened was this: On April 1, 2015, I got a call from a guy called Clem de Santos, who was involved in South African Equestrian. “Graeme,” he said, “we’ve got some big, big stuff with South African Equestrian, and would like to come and see you.”

“Look, guys,” I said, “I’ve got a lot of information on Equestrian already. Send me the information by email, because I’m now living in Grahamstown. It doesn’t make sense for you to come and see me from Jo’burg.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

About 15 minutes later he calls again: “We’re flying in. We’re coming in our private jet. We’re going to land at about three o’clock at the Grahamstown Air Force Base.”

This sounded ridiculous. I thought I was in a movie. It was just such a bizarre feeling. There was no-one else around, and there I was, standing in this middle of this airfield, and I’m looking at the date on my watch: April 1. I’m thinking, Graeme, you fool. There’s no one coming to visit you.

People need to appreciate how isolated Grahamstown is. I lived there about half a decade, and I don’t think I saw any air traffic in all that time.

That’s so funny, because that same night I went into the bar at the Albany. The guys were saying, “Did you hear that jet coming over the town?”

I was like, “Boys they came to see me!”

Anyway, there were three guys that met me, and they spoke to me for about an hour about the corruption in South African Equestrian. Usual story: People were enriching themselves, and the athletes were being charged ridiculous sums to enter the competitions, because someone had the monopoly on the entry systems. Lottery funding was being abused. A whole wide range of stuff. I was taking my notes.

“Close your laptop. We now want to talk about rhino poaching.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Guys, hold on. No, no, no. You’re going to get me killed. I’ve got a small digital publication, for sport only, and now you want me to get involved in—you want me to investigate and expose—a rhino-poaching syndicate which is somehow linked to South African Equestrian? Come now.”

Needless to say, the stuff was mind-blowing, but I said, “Look, guys. The rhino poaching is out of my league, but I’m only too happy to do the equestrian, because I’ve got a lot of other information which corroborates the stuff that you’re giving me.”

“Alright. You expose the corruption in equestrian, and we’ll help you in return. We’ve got a private investigator on our books. He’s looking into the rhino poaching, and he’s going to help you with the problems you’ve been having with Rautenbach and co.”

Anyway, they kept their word. Four days later I got a call from a private investigator called Theo Bronkhorst in Bloemfontein, who had a look at my phone. He said, “Look, Graeme. Your phone’s got four diversions.” Four different people, in other words, were listening to my calls.

The thing is, I knew it already. I knew my phone was being tapped. I had opened a criminal case with the Sandton Police Station before I left Johannesburg. But because I was implicating the Sports Ministry and SASCOC, the police just laughed it off. It got swept under the carpet. MTN, my service provider, wouldn’t help me either. No-one was prepared to help. I wrote to the South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) to try and get some help from them. No help whatsoever.

But this private investigator was helping me—and I could see that he was helping, because he had put a block on my phone, and every day afterwards a message would pop up on my screen about “an irregular or illegal attempt to access your device.” Someone was trying to re-tap the phone. They’d hacked into my emails. They knew everything that I was doing. My day-to-day movements had been put on that anonymous website.

Anyway, it was a Friday night, about ten o’clock. I was in my apartment in Grahamstown. I think it was April 15. Suddenly I get a call from Tim Marsland, one of the equestrian guys who’d come in on the jet. He was paying the private investigator. “Graeme,” he said, “get out of your condo! They’re coming to get you this weekend!” He told me the private investigator had “intercepted an immediate threat to your safety.”

I drove to a friend’s house in Port Alfred. Obviously never slept that night. Next morning called Tim Marsland. What should I do?

“Come back to Jo’burg. Let’s identify the threat before you do anything crazy.”

I hardly knew the guy, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I took his word, and I’ll never forget arriving at Jo’burg International Airport. He meets me there. We go down to his car in the basement. It’s got tinted windows. I can see he’s packing a gun. He sees that I can see. He says to me, “How do you know I’m not the bad guy?”

What a thing to say.

I stayed at his place for about two or three days in the south of Jo’burg. I couldn’t do anything. I was lost. I asked him, “What is the private investigator saying?”

“Well, he’s diverted your phone to Rustenburg, but they’re still looking for you.”

He wouldn’t tell me who was looking for me. Supposedly it had to do with my big exposure about lottery funding or whatever. “Look,” I said. “What should I do? Should I go to the US? My sister lives over there, and I’ve told her that I may need to get out pretty soon.”

Eventually he said, “Yeah, the private investigator thinks it’s still very hot for you. It’s probably a good idea to get out of the kitchen and go to the US.”

I got my sister to book me a ticket from the US, so they couldn’t trace me in SA, and flew out on a ten-year tourist visa to Cincinnati with a suitcase and a laptop, and applied for political asylum. To this day I’m still not sure who was behind the threat. Since publication of my book, in fact, I have reason to believe that I was double-crossed by the private investigator. I’ve since found out that he’s a proper scam artist. I’ve seen Facebook pages [ask Joffers for a link to these] on which people testify as to just how bad he is, how he’s taken their money. And Tim Marsland? The guy who was “helping” me? The guy who was paying for the private investigator? He’s currently sitting in jail. He’s been there about ten months, awaiting extradition to Botswana for his alleged involvement in a massive fraud scandal.

Oh my goodness. And these are the people you were getting help from!

Beautiful, isn’t it? I used to think I was a good judge of character, but when you become desperate … I don’t know. I didn’t know where to turn. And Tim, you know, was very good to me. I stayed with him and his wife for a few days in their house in the south of Jo’burg, and I really believed the guy was helping me.

You quote long stretches of your exchanges with Marsland—via WhatsApp, I think—in your initial months in Cincinnati. I was thinking, even as I read them, How do I know anything Marsland’s telling you is true? All that stuff about “pending arrests” which were never made, the inside track he claimed to have with the police… Do you now suspect that all that was nonsense?

Yes. 100 per cent. I think now it was … I mean, some of it may be true, but to be honest, for the most part I think it was BS. The fact is, he tried to get me to come back. He said me, “Graeme, things are getting hot, but the police want you to come back to give your testimony, because arrests are imminent. The private investigator will help you with his private security service and bodyguards and stuff like that.”

“Arrests of whom?” I would ask. It felt like a set-up.

He seemed to be claiming to know far more than he possibly could about the police’s thinking.

Correct. And to this day I don’t know what he was expecting me to do with those WhatsApp messages. Eventually I gave up: “Tim, this stuff just sounds ridiculous. You guys have been promising me arrests for how long now? Nothing’s ever happened.” And then the private investigator supposedly got threatened, too, and had to put his wife and daughter in a safe house or protective care. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. I kept following up with the police as well. Basically the SA Police just wrote off the case. It was all swept under the carpet.

At this time and place I do believe that I was double crossed, that someone paid the private investigator or Tim Marsland to get me out the country. Get me out the country, so that I’d stop my digital publication, so that I wouldn’t have access to the information, so that I wouldn’t be able to testify at the SASCOC Commission of Inquiry. Mark Alexander, president of SARU and SASCOC board member, has filed a criminal-defamation suit against me, so that as soon as I land in Johannesburg, I’ll be arrested. He knows that I have the dirt on him and how corrupt he is.

It’s just—it’s crazy that no-one’s prepared to dig any further or actually to run with the story. I guess a lot of sports journalists turned on me as well.

Well, yeah. That was going to be my next question: Did you get much solidarity from your peers?

Nothing. Nothing. There were two or three guys who said, “Jeez, Graeme. Great stuff. Really support what you’re doing.” Robert Marawa has always been a really solid journalist who asks the tough questions. He’s not scared to back down from asking any question. But for the most part…

Some of these sports journalists are literally on the payroll of the sporting federations. HSM isn’t an isolated case. Others get free trips and free dinners. But a lot of them are just fans. They’re fans before they’re journalists. They become too friendly with the people they’re covering. If you’re having a braai with a South African cricketer or administrator at his house, are you going to expose him for anything bad he might be doing? The same thing happened with Oscar Pistorius. How many journalists became huge fans of Oscar, and then couldn’t report the truth of what was happening in his life? I mean there were even one or two who would brag about the fact that they were drinking with him before his eighteenth birthday!

It’s become fashionable in recent years to write of Oscar that all the warning signs were there. But I believe you were among the first to blow the whistle in advance of that horrible night.

I’m not sure if I really blew the whistle ahead of time, but…

“Blowing the whistle” is probably the wrong way to put it, but it’s certainly true that you weren’t on board with the uncritical praise of him. When he behaved in a dubious way after losing one of his finals, you were pretty critical. I think you said, publicly, even before things came to a head, that he needed help.

Ah, yes. I had in mind that time he got drunk driving a boat and crashed into a pier. I pointed out that he could have killed people. He almost killed himself! He had to have facial reconstructive surgery. Then that gun goes off in Tashas restaurant. Then he storms out of an interview with the BBC when they asked him tough questions. Then he blows up when he loses in the Paralympics. He had a short fuse. Fame and fortune changed him. I liken it a lot to the OJ Simpson case. There were stories that were developing underneath—there was something boiling—and yet no-one was reporting about what was going on. I heard about parties that Oscar used to go to where recreational drugs were freely available and stuff, and there were journalists who knew about it. A lot of these things I didn’t know about, because I wasn’t around at that time. I like to keep my distance from the athletes, as much I’m friendly and have mutual respect with a lot of them. But others were closer. Others knew.

South African sports journalism is in a very poor place. The majority of sports journalists are fans before they’re journalists.

Ironically, you started as a fan. It was your outrage, as a Lions supporter, at how they were being treated that first led you along this path.

True, but I remember one of the first rugby columns that I wrote, exposing non-existent promotion/relegation system, and I said right up front, “I’m a die-hard Lions fan.” I put it out there right up front. Compare that to Keohane. The fact that you’ve got an accredited agent pushing one agenda and being a journalist at the same time—I mean, right up front he should just have said, “I’m Luke Watson’s unaccredited agent, and this is my story,” so that people know exactly where it’s coming from.

The sad part is that the more of this work I did, the less and less of a fan I became. I just couldn’t believe what was going on in the systems in South African sport.

You say you lost your patriotism as well.

Correct. I lost my patriotism. No-one could understand that. Up until probably about 2010/11, it mattered to me, but after that it didn’t really, because when South Africa were winning or doing well, it only papered over the cracks. For a month or two there would be euphoria. Everybody would be happy, as if there were no corruption to worry about, no maladministration, no nepotism. But it never goes away.

 

Part two of this interview will be posted shortly.