Last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa caused a stir when he defended cadre deployment in his testimony at the Zondo Commission.
‘I would say that when dealing with these kinds of matters,’ the president loftily remarked, ‘it is better to be circumspect and not to throw the baby out [with] the bathwater … the deployment committee has a number of considerations … One of those is just the developmental nature of the state we are creating. It [also] needs to focus on the political aspect … where we need to keep an eye on the mandate we have been given.’
On the day of Ramaphosa’s appearance at the Zondo Commission, the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) paid yet another visit to the Union Buildings to ask when we could expect the reply to our memorandum to the Presidency on citizen abuse that had been promised within 14 days. That promise was made on 3 March. To date, in spite of our promptings, the Presidency has not deigned to respond.
Ramaphosa’s comments at the Zondo Commission illuminate this disregard: Ramaphosa is not truly committed to reform or the plight of the ordinary citizen. His comments show that his loyalties lie with the cadre – while the average citizen is abandoned to the abuses of a system predicated upon the whims of the powerful.
What’s the deal with cadre deployment and why is it a problem? Cadre deployment is a practice which determines who fills senior posts in the civil service and in parastatals such as Prasa, Transnet, Eskom and SAA.
One of the arguments repeated by senior ANC members at the Zondo Commission is that the ANC Deployment Committee only makes recommendations. This sounds fairly reasonable – I could be recommended by a colleague for a job in my organisation without this being in any way inappropriate. But a problem does arise when recommendations are made on the basis of party affiliation, of being, in other words, a cadre.
Serve all citizens
Last month when ANC national chair Gwede Mantashe faced the Zondo Commission, Advocate Alec Freund pointed out that the Constitution provided for the establishment of a sufficiently non-partisan, career-orientated public service broadly representative of the South African community that would serve all citizens in an unbiased manner.
As Barbara Curson wrote on Moneyweb:
‘Freund failed to get a clear answer out of Mantashe as to whether cadres remained accountable to the party or to the government… [Freund] refers to the minutes of the meeting of the ANC’s national disciplinary committee – the NDC Report – on the deployment of cadres, which noted that ‘deployees of the ANC should always be loyal to the organisation.
‘Freund asked: Surely, once appointed, they should always be loyal to the ANC? And remarked that cadres who are loyal to the party cannot be non-partisan.
‘Mantashe explained that “non-partisanship means the ANC is sleeping and relying on luck, and not influencing any change in society”.’
Mantashe also argued that, post-apartheid, ‘(the) ANC had to deploy persons who understood transformative constitutionality’, a statement that seems contradictory. The question remains, are appointees loyal to the Constitution or to the party? Are they accountable to South African citizens and the law?
‘Went horribly wrong’
President Ramaphosa says the right – reassuring, earnest-sounding – things, acknowledging, for example, that ‘(our) electoral support is going down largely because of the corrosive corruption that our people saw as abhorrent. Things went horribly wrong but we are here to work with everybody to correct those, and we do this with humility because we are a feature of the superstructure of this country, we cannot run away from all these matters.’
But when it came to addressing what the crucial flaws are, and how they will be addressed, Ramaphosa ducked the questions at the Zondo Commission.
Ramaphosa was deputy president of the ANC and chair of its deployment committee during dubious Zuma-era appointments, but when Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo pointed out that surely there must have been regular reports to Cabinet concerning the functioning (or lack thereof) of SOEs at the time, Ramaphosa dodged the question, saying that ministers didn’t communicate with one another very much at the time.
‘We had a very siloed style of work,’ he said, ‘where almost everybody kept to their lane and where there was no cross-dimensional type of collegiate involvement.’
When asked to identify the ‘actual areas’ in which the party went wrong – so that it could avoid repeating such mistakes in the future – Ramaphosa said he would do this when he returned to the commission to testify in his capacity as state president next month.
In fact, although throughout the day he claimed that the party was going through a process of renewal that would put an end to corruption, he remained reluctant to elaborate on how the party intended to change course, and dismissed as rash former minister Barbara Hogan’s suggestion that the ANC do away with its deployment committee as a safeguard against state capture.
‘Corruption and ineptitude’
As IRR CEO Frans Cronje has pointed out, Ramaphosa was presented with an opportunity to place the blame for state capture on the deployment committee. But, despite astonishing government corruption and ineptitude, and counterproductive policies, the president and his administration ‘failed to take an easy off-ramp towards reform’. Thus, the deployment committee ‘will remain an obstacle – and perhaps now you can even argue the primary obstacle – to rooting out malfeasance and ineptitude across the government.’
As for not throwing the baby out with the bath water, the situation has reached a point where it is more about throwing the alligator of corruption out of the bathtub before it eats the baby that is our future as a country.
While Ramaphosa’s statement that cadre deployment ‘is a common feature of democratic practice around the world’ is not untrue, when it enables corruption to the degree that the whole country becomes crippled, hanging on to amounts to turning one’s back on the citizens of the country.
Just because you believe something will have a favourable outcome doesn’t mean that it will. There is a lesson in the legendary tale of the death of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of China, who is said to have died after taking mercury pills supplied by his alchemists and court physicians, believing them to be an elixir of immortality.
Continue to face abuse
Similarly, the evidence to date suggests that cadre deployment enables corruption in South Africa: it’s not going to help fix it. If government is not accountable to citizens, citizens will continue to face abuse and exploitation, while cadres dominate the resources and energies of the system.
As for trusting Ramaphosa’s disarming admission of flaws: actions and engagement with the questions would do more to convince. Though he may be admitting corruption in his party now, this is, after all, the same man who in 2014 said: ‘There was no corruption, nothing to do with Nkandla was unlawful. The “fire pool” is not even as big as an Olympic swimming pool.’
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