There can be no doubt that Wagner mercenary’s attempted march on Moscow hurt Putin to the bone.
The institution of “poetic justice“ that we invoke so frequently in our discourse is neither lyrical nor fair. It often has neither verse nor rhyme, and can sometimes be delivered with utmost blandness. That said, the expression still carries a certain moral strength to warn all of us humans to guard against extreme behaviour in all that we do, for retribution is not very far from where we stand.
Cases of what I am driving at this week are legion, but it will suffice for now to treat only two cases we have heard of this past few days, that is the cases of Rudolf Louis William Giuliani and Yevgeny Victorovich Prigozhin, a whole wide world apart and yet drawn close together by the headlines.
The American in this story made himself a great name as a public prosecutor against the Mafia bosses in New York in the 1980s, earning a reputation of toughness against crime.
He collected a number of plaudits, even an honorary knighthood from England’s Queen Elizabeth ll, riding on a wave of popular approval as a tough crime buster and became a popular mayor of the Great Apple.
Now he finds himself being prosecuted under the same laws he wielded against the Mob in the 1980s, including the charge of racketeering, referring to the trouble he went through trying to reverse the last presidential election which his pal Donald Trump lost but whose loss he refused to accept.
Giuliani’s problems with law enforcement seem to stem from his almost blind loyalty to Trump, an unquestioning friendship which suggests that if the former president told him to follow him to hell he would only ask for a few minutes to collect his toothbrush.
Yet at the same time he is the lawyer who warned Trump about an orange jumper-suit, which they could soon both be wearing if the courts find them culpable.
Well, the process has started, the lawyering has brought in the heaviest legal firepower money can buy, and the outcome cannot be predicted.
Compared to Giuliani, it is clear Prigozhin’s problems ended last Thursday when his plane dropped from the sky, if indeed it is true, he was one of the ten passengers on that flight.
Still, it is useful to spend a minute on this man who has been described as Russia’s most powerful mercenary and a personal friend of Russia President Vladimir Putin.
He seems to be the very epitome of the “poetry” in the “justice” I am talking about here. Having been literally a thief and a robber, there can be little doubt as to why Putin saw his usefulness. The man in the Kremlin saw what he could do with a man with zero integrity but endowed with great quantities of greed for power and money, unscrupulous and daring.
In situations like Crimea, Ukraine, Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and elsewhere, there were stupendous opportunities for the two men to make enough to enable them to retire comfortably anywhere in the world.
At the same time, ‘Putin’s Chef’ and his ragtag gangsters of an army, ranged across the Sahara to salvage tottering regimes, were making uranium accessible, and that has its uses for a resurgent Russia eager to occupy the seat once occupied by the erstwhile Soviet Union.
So, the Chef could make a sumptuous meal of what he could lay his hands on in Africa, and as long as he shared the spoils with Putin, he was okay.
But thuggery does not obey rules of good behaviour and etiquette, and once he had opened up huge and unlimited vistas of the expansive Sahara, his imagination new no bounds, and he began thinking that he could challenge his former boss.
Shaaban Robert, the great Kiswahili savant once wrote (in Kusadikika) that once the termite gets attracted to mortality, it grows a pair of little wings that it uses to fly to its perdition. The Chef had tired of just cooking and now wanted to be the host at the banquet.
It is a measure of the man’s stupid arrogance — probably caused by narcissism — that he thought he could do what he did in June and still live in Russia, and still catch a plane every when he needed to catch one.
There can be no doubt that this mercenary’s attempted march on Moscow hurt Putin to the bone and that he would find his moment to deliver his lesson to his Chef in a way that would not only chastise him but would be done in a particular manner, pour encourager les autres.
Thus, a quiet, neat knife-stab in the sand dunes outside Timbuktu at night would be out of the question, in favour of the dramatic optics of a kite hurtling to the ground from above the Muscovite skies; it is memorable.
Arguably, donning orange overalls for Giuliani – if it comes to that – would be a much easier fate than being in a tumbling plane, although a prison term is not exactly an Ibiza holiday cruise.
Still, the lesson to be drawn from this week’s headlines is that we all have to accept that our actions have consequences, and too often we find that the best choice is to err on the side of caution: the Chef should have run, and Giuliani should have shunned his friend.