Even if former president Thabo Mbeki ‘was not corrupt himself, he helped set the table for state capture’, his biographer Mark Gevisser argues in an updated edition of Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Gevisser said of his reappraisal of Mbeki that ‘the system of patronage and party control entrenched in the Mbeki era morphed into the Zuma kleptocracy’.
‘In my updated edition of The Dream Deferred, I argue that even if Mbeki was not corrupt himself, he helped set the table for state capture.
‘He did this by promoting Zuma to be his deputy president, despite early evidence of incompetence and moral laxity; by implementing affirmative action policies ripe for abuse; by failing to stem corrupt practices, particularly where it related to funding the ANC; and by imposing “democratic centralist” control of the state through policies such as cadre deployment. This meant valuing party loyalty over technocratic efficiency.
‘Mbeki embarked on their “political capture” of the state — as Ivor Chipkin and his team call it in their book Shadow State — and this opened the doors for the “institutional capture” that followed. Both projects professed lofty intentions: Mbeki’s to steer the state’s power towards the black majority; Zuma’s to repurpose state institutions in the name of “radical economic transformation”. But the system of patronage and party control entrenched in the Mbeki era morphed into the Zuma kleptocracy.’
Gevisser noted that ‘(affirmative) action policies are not, per se, vehicles for corruption. …But a primary problem with BEE, in SA, was the way it was used to fund the ruling party. This has its roots in the early 1990s, when returning exiles or released political prisoners were supported by people in the business world.’
He said that Zuma was ‘not alone in relying on sympathetic businessmen to facilitate his return to civilian life’.
Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred — Updated Edition is published by Jonathan Ball.
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