This Is How South Africa Became a Criminal State

The impact of the social media hashtag #VoetsekANC, and the comments that accompanied it, show that people finally understand we live under a criminal state.

The abuse of Covid-19 relief funds by ANC-linked cadres, raking in huge profit for adding no value (except their political connections), has been the last straw for many South Africans.

The tenderpreneur feeding frenzy was symbolised by Ace Magashule’s son buying a BMW worth R2-million, a week after it was revealed that his “company” (of which he is sole director) had scored big on a project to provide soap and masks to the Free State provincial government.

Although this is small scale corruption in comparison to, say, the Arms Deal or the Medupi power plant, or the billions raked off from state-owned enterprises, the callousness of looting donor funds provided to protect people from a potentially deadly illness reflects the extent of the ANC’s moral depravity.

The key question no one seems to be addressing is this: How did we manage, in 26 short years of democracy, to fall from the pedestal of international respectability; to become a byword for corruption and criminality?

Why didn’t our magnificent Constitution (often described as one of the best in the world), with all its checks and balances, prevent this? And what about our vigorous opposition, vigilant media, independent judiciary, active civil society, and a raft of Chapter 9 institutions? Why did they all fail to stop the onward march of the state from international poster child for democracy, to corruption and blatant criminality?

The answer is: because the ANC legalised corruption. It did so openly, under our noses, often with the fulsome support of almost all the institutions that should have prevented it, including the international community.

What’s more, these institutions not only failed to protect us – they actually facilitated this downward trajectory.

To get to the root of the problem, we must face the fact that Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE), as conceptualised and implemented by the ANC, made corruption legal and morally acceptable.  Anyone who saw through it, and called it for what it is, was automatically dismissed as “racist”.

In over 100 laws mandating B-BBEE and racial “representivity” throughout the public and private sector, the ANC created a useful camouflage to cover its deployment committee’s work in setting up this looting machine. Cadres were deployed to all institutions of state, controlling multi-billion budgets, dispensing funds and managing procurement systems, with the primary aim of enriching the ANC cadres in business and securing significant “kickbacks” for the party and its network.

Inevitably, before long, competing networks arose. The factions in the ANC are not driven primarily by political or ideological differences, but by intense contestation for control over these funding sources. After 26 years, the South African state has become a web of competing criminal syndicates posing as a government.

And they made fools of the electorate by successfully selling the lie that their form of B-BBEE was synonymous with black empowerment. It was the very opposite. It left SA destitute, with unemployment levels at 30% (and that was before the Covid-19 pandemic).

Some people still believe the ANC’s race laws were motivated by a real commitment to redress. I do not believe that, and never have.

And to be fair, the ANC has been pretty honest about its intentions from the start.

Right at the start of our democracy, the ANC told us that their National Democratic Revolution (NDR) required “State Capture”. It took 23 years before journalists and most analysts actually took this seriously.

As Joel Netshitenzhe, a leading ANC intellectual, wrote in the ANC mouthpiece Umrabulo in 1996: The aim of the NDR “is 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”.

The ANC’s deployment policy was aimed at achieving party control of the state. And then, through the state, controlling every other sector of society by introducing stricter and stricter B-BBEE and EEA laws that enabled cadre deployment (and the associated corruption and criminalisation) to reach into every money flow – every stream of funding – in the country.

In the earlier years, the notorious Chancellor House provided a clearing house, allocating tenders and contracts through the state in return for generous donations to the ANC.

But even that filter finally fell away. Now it is straight, personalised corruption to politically linked individuals.

We were warned. As Kgalema Motlanthe said in 2007:

“This rot is across the board. It is not confined to any level or any area of the country. Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money.”

The power struggles in the ANC are so fierce precisely because they mean control of the machinery of cadre deployment to loot on behalf of those connected to the winning faction.

Former Business Day editor, Tim Cohen, described it aptly in 2008 when he wrote: “At issue is the creation of the state in which politicians enter politics not with the intention of public service, but with the intention of getting rich. The result is that political battles are a kind of proxy for deciding not how social issues are to be addressed, but which faction will gain the ability to insert itself into the circulation of money streams.” (Cohen is editor of Business Maverick – Ed)

The only places where this has not occurred, is where the DA governs.

The unparalleled revulsion to the extent of looting in the rest of the country is based in the disbelief that the ANC would actually use a national crisis to milk the state – especially the billions borrowed to deal with Covid-19.

In order to try to prevent this feeding frenzy, the DA went to court seeking a declaratory that B-BBEE criteria could not be used to disburse disaster relief to small businesses that had suffered severe losses under the lockdown. The court dismissed our case. It found that not only was the minister empowered to use B-BBEE criteria, but that she was mandated to do so.

Our application for leave to appeal this judgment was also dismissed, this time with costs. The court found that while the minister was constitutionally and legally compelled to use B-BBEE criteria, she might choose not to give this criterion any weight in allocating the resources.

This single judgment demonstrates the extent to which all the checks and balances against the institutionalisation of corruption and the resulting criminalisation of the state, have failed.

The only way out of this mess is to understand that no democracy can make sustained economic progress without actively striving to become a meritocracy, where people are appointed to positions, or win tenders, on clear, value-adding criteria, not on their colour or their political contacts.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that two sons of ANC Secretary-General Ace Magashule, as well as various close allies, benefited so handsomely from contracts for PPE equipment at significantly inflated prices. As Ace himself said: “There is no law against it.”