One of the best advantages of South Africa’s democracy is freedom of speech and publication. Mpumelelo Mkhabela’s book, The Enemy Within, is the newest in a cascade of publications during the last decade that document corruption and theft by main politicians in the nation’s ruling celebration.
In all too many international locations in Africa and Asia a book like this might outcome in its writer’s detention, censorship of the book, persecution of the publishers and printers, and harassment of bookshops that offered it.
South Africa is amongst a choose group of democracies that let such exposés. Books which have explored the deepening ranges of corruption in the nation embody How to Steal a City, How to Steal a Country, Gangster State and After the Party.
The Enemy Within takes readers by a collection of well-publicised corruption scandals. It argues that the African National Congress (ANC) lost the struggle in opposition to corruption by tolerating corrupt practices, failing to carry the corrupt to account, and going so far as to defend them. The ANC has ruled South Africa because the formal finish of apartheid in 1994.
Corruption scandals
Mkhabela, a former newspaper editor, considers the ANC’s first large take a look at of ethics – which it failed – was in 1996 when it expelled cupboard minister Bantu Holomisa from the celebration. The purpose was that he’d said publicly that ANC cupboard minister Stella Sigcau had earlier in her profession accepted a bribe.
The book then goes by different distinguished circumstances of corruption. The scandals embody the looting of VBS mutual financial institution, which concerned “theft, abuse of power, robbing of the elderly, and even murder” (4 members of the South African Municipal Workers’ Union had been killed). (p41)
There was the uncommon imprisonment of an ANC MP – Tony Yengeni, in 2003, for fraud and corruption. There was additionally the theft of public funds supposed for a memorial service for Nelson Mandela. Then got here the procurement by transport parastatal Transnet of locomotives that had been too tall for use on many of the nation’s railway strains.
Jacob Zuma, then president, dismantled the Scorpions police unit, which specialised in precedence crimes. Public funds had been misused for his non-public residence. The firm Bosasa allegedly greased the palms of ANC politicians in return for big contracts with the prisons division. After a wave of Zuma appointments to the National Prosecuting Authority, the book says, the authority
was clearly dancing to the tune of prime ANC politicians. (p123)
The case of Jackie Selebi, the erstwhile head of police, exhibits two ANC failings. Mkhabela reminds readers of the dearth of condemnation from the ANC when Selebi was convicted of corruption in 2010.
To this I’d add a second level about cadre deployment: Selebi had no coaching or on the job expertise in policing. Had he been saved in diplomatic postings, scandals would nearly definitely by no means had occurred.
The ANC seems blind to this apparent level.
The robbing of funds for a Mandela memorial service reveals one other shocking fact. These municipal funds had initially been earmarked to subsidise poor households (p74) who couldn’t afford municipal providers corresponding to water and electrical energy.
Most politicians would take into account that invaluable for his or her subsequent electioneering. But politicians diverted or stole the funds. In quick, so excessive was their private greed that it even undermined their efficacy as politicians.
In summarising widespread company collusion with corruption, Mkhabela notes that firms disguise bribes underneath the “cost of business” merchandise in their steadiness sheets. (p63)
Then there may be the sample of assassinations. Anyone who threatens to show tender corruption dangers being eradicated by employed hitmen. In some situations, as soon as caught and convicted, the hitmen are even taken care of in jail (p67)
ANC leaders
South Africa had a poisonous mixture of outdated cash, businessmen wanting to win favours from politicians, and political leaders able to sort out anybody who dared make corruption claims in opposition to the celebration. (p21)
None of the ANC’s leaders have behaved properly. Even Nelson Mandela, who pressed for the dismissal of Holomisa and requested the chief of the South African Communist Party, Jeremy Cronin, to jot down a leaflet denigrating him.
Mkhabela notes that Thabo Mbeki, as president, was conflicted: he deplored corruption. But he regarded each exposé as a white racist assault.
Mbeki signed up South Africa to the Southern African Development Community Protocol against Corruption, the UN Convention against Corruption, and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
Also to his credit score, Mbeki arrange autonomous establishments in opposition to corruption that survived his personal efforts to undermine them. It would require main exertions on the a part of Zuma, who succeeded Mbeki as president, to dismantle them. (p55)
Zuma needed to emasculate the prosecution authority to keep away from being prosecuted himself; he needed to undermine the South African Revenue Service to forestall being sued for unpaid tax. These allowed a number of the corrupt to seize the state.
The rebuilding of those establishments has taken the entire of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency to this point.
But Mkhabela misses one pertinent level. Mbeki oversaw huge pay rises for the highest posts in politics, the forms together with the municipalities, and the parastatals. This vastly raised the stakes in ANC political battles. Mbeki by no means reproached Smuts Ngonyama, then the ANC’s spokesperson, for his broadly quoted remark
I didn’t battle (in the liberation motion) to be poor.
In his conclusions Mkhabela says:
The incentives and rewards for being corrupt for the politically linked far outweigh the dangers of being caught in the act. (p198)
But he ends by noting that corruption generates pushback from the general public.
Keith Gottschalk, Political Scientist, University of the Western Cape
This article is republished from The Conversation underneath a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.