If AfriForum did not exist, politicians who don’t want citizens to know what they do with public money would probably need to invent it.
It is hard to believe that AfriForum and Advocate Gerrie Nel’s threat to launch a private prosecution against Julius Malema is meant to help the fight against corruption. An actual prosecution is unlikely — and unnecessary now since the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) is due to make a decision on the case in August. So they are clearly trying to make a political point — but the point they are trying to make is certain to set back the fight against corruption.
By choosing as their target not a government official but an opposition politician, who happens to be demanding land expropriation without compensation, they have ensured they will be seen to be striking a blow for whiteness, not clean government. They also seem keen to signal that only whites, rather than the black people who dominate government, can deal with corruption. And so they are discrediting those who really care about clean government by giving a useful propaganda weapon to politicians who have something to hide.
The EFF should be ... fully investigated. But AfriForum’s decision to turn corruption claims into a crude instrument of racial politics has made this less likely.
Anyone who now asks uncomfortable questions about misuse of public office will be tarred with AfriForum’s racial agenda and will find it harder to be heard.
AfriForum probably does not mind that this will set back the fight against corruption. This suits the organisation because, the more politicians are free to misuse public trust, the more the prejudices of those who believe the country must be saved from rule by the majority will be strengthened, and the more they will feel they need AfriForum.
The rest of us, who prefer honest government to racial myths, should, of course, be very worried.
As luck would have it, a concrete example of the damage AfriForum has done appeared in the media late last week. Investigative journalism unit amaBhungane, building on a "case study" by former Johannesburg Roads Agency head Sean Phillips, claims that the EFF has worked with the IFP in Joburg to control tender processes to favour contractors close to them. The DA administration in the city, they say, does nothing to stop this because it is a minority government and needs the votes of the two parties.
If this is true, it would throw new light on the EFF’s role in Joburg and, perhaps, in other councils too. First, it would explain why the EFF, on which the DA relies to stay in office in Joburg, does nothing to press the city administration to address the needs of the citizens for whom it claims to fight, such as residents of Johannesburg’s inner city. If the claims are true, the answer would be clear: the EFF presses the DA administration to do a great deal, but for contractors who are close to it rather than for the city’s poor.
Second, it might explain why the EFF has been trying to remove the DA mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) but not those in Joburg and Tshwane. The stated reason is that NMB mayor Athol Trollip is white. AmaBhungane and Phillips’s case study suggests the real answer may be that, because the DA does not need it to govern NMB, the EFF cannot use its leverage there to influence tenders in favour of contractors who support it: it has no stake in the survival of the DA government in NMB but, if the claims are true, has a huge interest in making sure that its Joburg counterpart (and that in Tshwane?) don’t go anywhere.
These are serious claims. The EFF should be pressed to answer them and they should be fully investigated. But AfriForum’s decision to turn corruption claims into a crude instrument of racial politics has made this less likely. For a while, at least, anyone who presses the EFF to explain its role in Joburg risks being accused of doing AfriForum’s bidding and of pursuing an anti-black agenda.
What can people who, unlike Afriforum, really do care about clean government do about this? The answer is surely to reduce AfriForum to a sideshow by ensuring the fight against corruption is led by people who know that misusing public money is a non-racial activity and that clean government is not an issue best left to those who think honesty is a racial issue.
Rather than remaining silent because AfriForum has muddied the waters, real anti-corruption campaigners need to insist even more loudly on answers to the questions raised by amaBhungane and Phillips. Clean government is important not only because most South Africans, particularly those who live in poverty, depend on it; it also unsettles the racial labels which are so popular among the gallery to which AfriForum seems to be playing. So the more people who do not believe in racial myths demand answers from politicians and officials, the more AfriForum’s stunt is reduced to the unnecessary distraction it is.
The fight to hold politicians to account and to protect the public’s money is too important to be left to people whose agenda has nothing to do with clean government.
• Friedman is research professor with the humanities faculty of the University of Johannesburg.
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