Steinhoff is corporate South Africa's handmaid to State Capture. They share the same DNA -- people who knew better and could have done something chose silence.

Markus Jooste's death by suicide on Thursday 21 March 2024 has sparked almost as much vitriol as the crimes he committed which led to the karmic noose inexorably tightening around his neck.

Much has been written about how his decision to take his own life let him escape the full reckoning that was his due for wreaking untold ruin to institutional and individual investors alike. That's a topic for debate in itself, but what his suicide does do though is to force us to rethink the binary construct of good and evil.

It also reminds us of the enduring, and critical, importance of corporate activism.

There's a tendency worldwide, not just in South Africa, to reduce everything to good or bad with no middle road: the bad guys in the Westerns wear the black hats and the good guys wear the white Stetsons.

It's a comforting construct but it is ultimately self-defeating because it glosses over the truth, which is that evil lurks in all of us. And creating hyper-villains that we can blame and loathe is a distraction that stops us from looking within, understanding the seed of this and being able to root it out.

The world...