Despite my surname, I've never had much of a mind for crime. I fear that's about to change.
Here's why. I do not own a Bafana jersey. That's also going to change soon, and I will happily buy the best fake I can find. And so I will commit a crime. Guilty, guv'nor. Take me away.
Like most criminals, I will blame my dastardly actions on a third party: the officials of the SA Football Association (Safa).
"This," one of them said with a satisfied smirk on television the other day, "Is a genuine Bafana jersey." Then he held up another shirt and scowled, "and this is a fake Bafana jersey."
Could have fooled me. The jerseys looked identical. But wait. There's more. He pointed out that the sleeves of the real thing were hemmed with green thread. No such luck for the counterfeit. And that was that as far as differences went. Actually, it wasn't.
The official Bafana jersey costs R599. You can lay your hands on an ersatz version for R180. Let's see: R419 - the difference between the prices of the jerseys - for a bit of green stitching? Umm, I don't think so.
So, money is what separates fact from fiction here. Safa makes a mint from sales of its official merchandise. It makes not one cent from the stuff sold in dodgy flea-markets.
Forgive me if I fail to see the immorality in an organisation being fleeced out of the profits of overpriced products. The same products that other companies offer for sale at a fraction of the official price. The last time I looked, that was called healthy competition.
You can see the same sort of non-thinking in the decision to slash the price of World Cup tickets. Marvellous though the idea may seem, South Africans who shelled out for their tickets when the prices were higher won't think so.
And another thing. Many of the fake jerseys out there are emblazoned with the Protea badge on the left breast. All well and good - we are talking about the national football jersey, after all.
But the shirt Safa would flog to the likes of us for R599 is sans Protea.
Do the people who run Safa honestly want the rest of us to think that those evil criminals who manufacture and sell counterfeit goods are more patriotic than they are?
Perhaps they don't want that. As we speak, Safa is casting about for ideas on how to implement its decision to print the national emblem on to the jerseys it has already sold.
Hang on. I need a moment to make sense of this nonsense. So, even if we take the cost factor out of this discussion, it appears that the underworld has produced a more desirable football jersey than the folks in the white hats at Safa.
And Safa is now wondering how to recall its jerseys to upgrade them to the superior level of the fakes.
How beautifully diabolical. So much so that I resolved to channel Lewis Carroll and lurch into similarly fantastical ridiculousness. I tried hard, putting on one pink and one purple sock, drinking pomegranate juice upside down, and singing "Blue Moon" to a treasured portrait of my mad aunty May.
But, no, nothing I could dream up in my altered state competed with this bizarre reality. My gob is truly smacked. Call me floored, flummoxed and frazzled. But, hey, don't call me law-abiding.
- This article was originally published on page 32 of Cape Times on February 24, 2010
