Former President Thabo Mbeki declared in last week’s Mail & Guardian that he and his successors “owe and will make no apology to anybody whatsoever” for vigorously resisting the disclosure of the report given to him by senior Judges Sisi Khampepe and Dikgang Moseneke, which concluded that Zimbabwe’s 2002 presidential elections “cannot be considered to be free and fair”. Yet Mbeki delivers a rebuke in the dead language of state authority, rather than a reasoned response in our own budding dialect of state accountability.