I am sick of political apologists for corruption, saying “you can’t blame a guy for wanting to make a few spare bucks for himself”. Well, you can, and I do. Here is why:

As a teenager living in Scottsville, PMB, one of my favourite walks was the UNP campus. My brother had already studied there, and one of my first bands “Swing Inc”, operated from that campus. My mother was employed there, so it was familiar territory, and I walked every centimetre of it. I enjoyed it most during the long summer vac. when the students were away. That meant that I could enjoy many happy laps around the sports field.

The irascible, racist groundsman knew me, and saved his wrath for lecturer HWD “Cake” Manson’s dachshund, “Dunkel”. I once saw him shouting at the dumping dog:

“>“Get out of my garden, you bloody German!”

It is a safe bet that Scottish groundsman wasted years of his youth in a German POW camp.

One December vacation, on the deserted campus, I noticed earthworks happening on the Ridge Rd side. “Swimming pool” was my first thought, but the hole was narrow, and then a concrete screed followed way before it got near pool depth. That was followed by factory style steel girders, and then bricks. Building progress was brisk. The place fairly shot up.

Within the three month holiday period, the entire buidling was erected, glazed, floored, wired and painted. I wandered in through an open door and was greeted by Professor JCW Heath, often seen in the basements below Physics Department labs, where Bill Ainslie had completed his degree some years before. I knew who he was, but he did not know me.

“The new Fine Arts department” he said, very proudly.

Years later, when I was a student in that same building, the story came out. Prof Heath had, for years, motivated without success for a new building. “No budget” was the rebuttal. So, he made a plan. Nobody queried his requests for maintenance jobs: they were just paid. So, he “cooked the books”, something like this:

He fabricated maintenance jobs, produced invoices for them, and found a way of channeling the money into savings. Whether this was by working with friends, I never found out, but in something like 8 years, he had enough in the secret account to get the plans done. Prof DG Malherbe signed off on the plans, knowingly or not, and the contractors were given the go-ahead. It was said that Jack Heath sourced every item on the bill of materials, presided over every tiniest detail. He had contributed to design too, with a clerestory roof that poured light in, but no direct sunlight reached the floor from overhead.

I drew, painted, and sculpted for more than two years in the buiding, and it was an airy, sunny delight.

In conversation, Prof Heath said to me:

If I had taken a single penny, that whole effort would have come down on top of me.

Not a single penny went to Heath. Neither Prof Heath nor Prof Malherbe lost their jobs, so the ‘surprise’ spanking new building they found after a summer holiday must have been approved of. It was the house that Jack built, wearing his construction project-manager hat, and it has served thousands of students over its sixty odd years.

Better to say sorry, than ask for permission.

So, I DO blame people for taking a few bucks for themselves, more so because, to echo an ANC person:

We knew there would be people who skimmed and creamed. What we didn’t expect was that people would steal the whole thing.