State capture has become an operative concept for understanding what has befallen South Africa.
Over the past decade, so the narrative goes, South Africa was plundered by a network of the vengeful and the venal. Centred around President Jacob Zuma – a troika of brothers originally from India, now resident in Dubai, playing a seminal role – they proceeded to suborn the state, pillaging its resources and undermining its institutions.
As former ANC grandee and chair of the Moral Regeneration Movement, Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, framed it: ‘When a small, powerful group of power-hungry and greedy people take control of key parts of the core structures of a society, such as the most powerful politicians, the police, public broadcasting, criminal prosecution, and above all, access to taxpayers’ money in order to benefit themselves corruptly at the expense of the nation, and by their having captured key law enforcement institutions, avoid prosecution, you have state capture.’
It would be correct to say that this has been a defining experience for South Africa. To large swathes of the country – the public and commentariat alike – it offers an explanation for the dire condition in which South Africa finds itself. This is the reason we failed properly to recover from the global financial crisis, and why our economic progress remains anaemic to the point when South Africans are on average getting poorer. Corruption became South Africa’s great game and the functioning of the state was twisted to make it all possible.
This has been put on display through the Zondo Commission, or to use its official name, the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture. It is reminiscent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s, although its hearings have ground on for a longer time.
Revealing the underside
If exposure of the underside of governance was the intention, the Commission is to be commended. It has shone a light on the extent to which malfeasance has metastasised in the state, and across society. This was about corruption, certainly, but not only in the manner of material greed followed by grand larceny to satisfy it. It was a symptom of a malaise that is much deeper.
Reduced to a bare essence, the Zondo Commission highlighted the extent to which the legal and illegal have blended together in South Africa. It set out how those holding power, won legitimately in democratic elections according to a revered Constitution, could abuse that power to advantage themselves and to distort those very constitutional arrangements.
Whatever his own role and responsibility, this did not begin with Jacob Zuma.
Its roots were rather in the nature of the African National Congress (ANC) and its self-conception as a natural and eternal leader of South Africa. No mere political party, it was supposedly the embodiment of ‘the people’ and a repository of political morality. To travel with the ANC was to be on the correct arc of history. It followed that any restraint on its power was at best unnecessary and at worst an outright burden laid upon the deserving masses who looked to the party for their salvation.
Cadre deployment
State capture, properly understood, was formalised as ANC party policy in 1997. In a document entitled The State, Property Relations and Social Transformation, it set out policy on the way governance should be conducted: ‘Transformation of the state entails, first and foremost, extending the power of the National Liberation Movement over all levers of power: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, intelligence structures, the judiciary, parastatals, and agencies such as regulatory bodies, the public broadcaster, the central bank and so on.’
To this end, party loyalists would be installed – ‘deployed’ – to commandeer those ‘centres of power’. Carl Niehaus (then still a member of the party in respectable standing) summed up the thinking: ‘The party line and leadership should be followed blindly, and … the judicial and democratic institutions of the state should merely be instruments to carry out ANC policy’.
The counter-constitutionality of this was obvious, although many observers made remarkable leaps of logic to avoid confronting it. Perhaps it was comforting to do so. A Business Day editorial from 2000 has been doing the rounds recently, pronouncing the erstwhile Democratic Party ‘guilty of McCarthyism’ – for having pointed out the truth of this.
Cadre deployment was intended to create an alternative authority structure to the one that the Constitution prescribed – while commandeering the formal authority of the state and its reach into the country’s resources.
Tenuous administration
The baleful effects of this policy would soon be seen, as an already tenuous administration was consciously politicised. A report published by the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in 2009, State of Local Government in South Africa, was refreshingly blunt it its observations: ‘Evidence has been collected to dramatically illustrate how the political / administrative interface has resulted in factionalism on a scale that, in some areas, is akin to a battle over access to state resources rather than any ideological or policy differences.’
Today, local government remains severely compromised – if not largely dysfunctional – with all the implications for diminished quality of life, substandard business environment and forgone economic opportunities.
These costs were borne by South Africa as a whole. For a small elite, however, the capture of state power could prove lucrative indeed. Key here was the Black Economic Empowerment legislation. It’s arguable that little in the policy field has proven quite so controversial. Invoking the very real injustices of South Africa’s past, and the need to encourage ever-wider inclusion, few were willing to speak critically of the idea. Yet there has been very little to show for it. Vast fortunes for a few, but not much besides. Minister Pravin Gordhan memorably remarked that ‘BEE policies have not worked and have not made South Africa a fairer or more prosperous country.’ Not even its supporters typically try to defend the policy on its record.
The Zondo Commission reminded the country just how much BEE has become a politically palatable cover for some of the country’s worst pathologies. Whether it did offer a path to a more inclusive economy – and global experience would question this – it was never going to do so in the political environment that was being fostered in South Africa. And as the testimony around the operation of Bosasa emphasised (not to mention Adriaan Basson’s book on the matter), it offered rich pickings to the unscrupulous, irrespective of colour or background.
What all this amounted to was the sacrifice of South Africa’s interests for those of the ruling party and the patronage network that it built. This was the first manifestation of state capture, and had been established long before Zuma’s ascent to the presidency.
Sadly, the Zondo Commission may also be remembered for what it revealed about the persistence of state capture in the post-Zuma era.
The second iteration
Cue President Ramaphosa’s testimony to the Commission. In a sense, his presence was both important and positive. That the head of state should subject himself to questioning by a commission is no small thing. The substance of his testimony, on the other hand was – to appropriate one of his signature remarks – shocking.
Above all, his comments about cadre deployment were deeply disturbing. This was, he averred, merely a means for the ruling party to make recommendations for appointments. Among these, he confirmed, were judges. It’s hard to imagine anything that would undermine South Africa’s constitutional order more than a politicised judiciary, but there it was. Completely innocuous, said the president, and not to be judged harshly.
Indeed, the President protested that as Zuma’s deputy he had to remain in place, fighting a desperate rearguard action against state capture, failing which the country might have suffered ‘the unfettered expansion of the state capture project.’ How any of us might have responded to the circumstances in which then Deputy President Ramaphosa found himself is open to question. But his argument is grotesquely implausible, given the stated intention of cadre deployment. It is even more so, given that as deputy president of the ANC, he chaired the deployment committee. The performance of the luminaries that came out of this deployment requires no elaboration. And whether or not the ‘state capture project’ was ‘unfettered’ or not, as Deputy President, Ramaphosa was not far removed from it.
The key inference to be drawn is that this poisonous practice will continue, with the President’s blessing. If any proof should be required, here it is: President Ramaphosa’s incumbency represents more continuity than change on this issue.
Political nepotism
The consequences will be predictable. Dr Simo Lushaba of the Institute of Directors of South Africa correctly responded that cadre deployment was a form of political nepotism. Its impact reverberates throughout society. ‘We cannot convince any entities, public or private, to appoint leaders based on their competence and merit, while still driving transformation, if the head of state and his ruling party cling so tightly to their brand of political nepotism—even after so much has gone wrong. Ethical leadership requires that leaders can only expect the same standards of conduct from others that they hold themselves to.’
This is simply the approach to governance that is hardwired into the ANC and the state it presides over. The capacity to conceive of the fundamental changes the country so desperately needs is simply absent. (As the Covid pandemic gathered momentum, the confident assertions made by some that the moment for reform had dawned – ‘Oom Cyril has got this,’ opined one foreign-based observer in a letter to the media – stand discredited.)
The realities of South Africa’s numerous predicaments have, however, forced some adaptation. With South Africa’s productive economy now increasingly unable to provide the means to fund the patronage network – a consequence in no small measure of its existence in the first place – new resources will be required.
This is the second iteration of state capture. The President has declared that South Africa’s ‘recovery’ will be led by the state. On its existing record, this should raise alarms.
And so it does. In recent days, a proposal has emerged from the Department of Social Development for an effective tax of as much as 12% of employees’ earnings. This will – supposedly – guarantee adequate pensions upon retirement, although given the record of the state, the odds are not in favour of this. It would, however, mean a massive infusion of funds into state coffers. These could then be ‘invested’ in ‘developmental’ initiatives… For the greater good, of course, although precisely what that might be is a matter of expansive interpretation.
Developmental imperative also arises in discussion of pension funds and whether they might be gifted the ‘opportunity’ to contribute to infrastructure build. This is not about prescribed assets, one must understand. Until it becomes that.
Profitable possibilities
Or the National Health Insurance, a state monopoly and monopsony around healthcare, with its own profitable possibilities for those appropriately positioned – while simultaneously nodding at the ideological objective of equality of care for all (aside, one understands, from those able to seek treatment abroad…).
Or, most bluntly, the idea of expropriation without compensation. After a proposed constitutional amendment – the first to the country’s Bill of Rights – and reconstituted expropriation legislation, the South African state will take upon itself the responsibility to recast property holding. This, it claims, will rectify the denial of land and property rights to South Africa’s majority – though its current approach has been to maintain this arrangement, and not to grant title. Watch for the ‘vesting’ of land in the state.
The list is likely to be longer, for the appetites of politically driven patronage communities are vast indeed, and are not easily sated. The scale of the plundering may well be far larger than what we have seen so far.
There is a rich irony about all this. State capture has inflicted monumental damage on South Africa. The damage is apparent and acknowledged. But whether South Africa truly appreciates what it was and what brought the country to its present parlous state is rather less clear.
State capture is a reality that has infected the very core of governance in South Africa. Zuma may – or mayhap not – have passed from the political scene. A certain Dubai-based family may – or may not – one day return to face the consequences of its actions. There may – or may not – be prosecutions arising from the Zondo Commission. But the trajectory on which South Africa has been placed, and its endorsement by the President, is one that seems poised to continue. South Africa should be under no illusion that this is yesterday’s danger.
[Image: Gordon Johnson from Pixabay]
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend