GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Why the ANC will never solve corruption

Typically, in trying to understand the state’s response to corruption, political analysts tend to review three things: policy, mechanisms and outcomes.

That is, whether there is an effective legislative framework designed to combat corruption (say, the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act 2004) and how well structured it is; the particular tools the state uses to enact that policy (say, the Hawks, the courts, or the SA Police Service), their condition, resources and performance; and the deliverables (how many people have been charged, arrested or convicted).

However, to a far lesser extent, is there ever a focus on the internal organisational culture of the ANC itself. Culture is, of course, a more subjective business. And so, there is some hesitation to define, examine and understand it. But, make no mistake, it can make a mockery of the best systems if it runs in the opposition direction to their purpose and intent.

This divide, between formal and informal politics, is where and why the ANC thrives. Always, it will direct conversation to its formal record. On “state capture”, for example, it will point to the commission of inquiry. Always, its answer to criticism is: “Look what steps we have taken”. But those steps never lead anywhere, and you can be sure the ANC itself is not walking them.

There is much hay to be made within this universe. On all three fronts — policy, mechanisms and outcomes — there are profound problems. But that fact that all three exist at all gives the ANC government a certain legitimacy. With that, more often than not, the benefit of the doubt.

The glue that binds, however, is the ANC’s own organisational culture. It is often alluded to, in phrases such as “political will”, but it is all-determining. And that is a position evidenced by this simple observation: put all the formal elements of the SA state in the hands of a political party that actually took corruption seriously, and they would be perfectly adequate to make a profound, if not decisive difference.

In the ANC’s hands, however, they cannot. Call it what you want — political will or organisational culture — but something inside that party is lacking. And, until it is remedied, the state will never become an effective force in fighting corruption. The problem is, it can never be remedied, and that is why the ANC will never solve corruption.

The ANC’s organisational culture

Let’s us try then, in general terms, to define and understand the organisational culture that underpins the ANC’s response, such as it is, to corruption.

There are three elements to it. The first is low self-esteem. The ANC is deeply and profoundly petrified of one archetype above all others: the idea that a “black government” is profoundly corrupt.

The second is a lack of shame or embarrassment. Why this is, is complex to explain. In part, it has to do with its collective mentality — if there are no individuals inside the ANC, there is no such thing as individual responsibility. In part, it has to do with an internal understanding of what accountability is — that it rests more on explanation than consequence. And, in part, it flows from the first component, low self-esteem, and a refusal to admit, for fear of some racial conclusion, that it is fundamentally compromised on this front.

The third is arrogance and, with it, contempt for constitutionalism. This disdain is fuelled by a rampant majoritarianism, culturally and formally, through decades of unchecked national power. Underpinning it is the belief that the constitution was born of the ANC and is ultimately subservient to it. In turn, that the ANC is the one true embodiment of “the will of the people”, and thus pre-eminent.

There are other contributing factors to this third element. Many in the ANC believe, for example, the party is simultaneously divinely sanctioned by God. Likewise, there is much ideological fundamentalism. But, primarily, the ANC’s contempt for constitutional norms and standards is legitimated, to its own mind, by power and its seemly unbreakable hold on it.

The politics of low self-esteem

Different leaders in the ANC emphasise different elements of this unholy trinity. But all three are always present. Former president Thabo Mbeki, by way of illustration, spent much time obsessing about the first, and the perception by “white” South Africans and “the West”, that the ANC was inherently corrupt because it was a “black government”.

Mbeki’s 2003 ANC Today essay, titled “Fishers of Corrupt Men”, is perhaps the quintessential illustration of this insecurity. Focusing on the arms deal, which he insisted was above board and relentless pursued only because certain people wished to racially damn the ANC administration, he wrote: “We should not, and will not, abandon the offensive to defeat the insulting campaigns further to entrench a stereotype that has, for centuries, sought to portray Africans as a people that are corrupt, given to telling lies, prone to theft and self-enrichment by immoral means; a people that are otherwise contemptible in the eyes of the ‘civilised’. We must expect that, as usual, our opponents will accuse us of ‘playing the race card’, to stop us confronting the challenge of racism.”

He concluded: “The fishers of corrupt men are determined to prove everything in the anti-African stereotype. They rely on their capacity to produce long shadows and innumerable allegations around the effort of our government to supply the SA National Defence Force with the means to discharge its constitutional and continental obligations.”

This base fear plays itself out on many different levels. Why, for example, even the most ANC-sympathetic people ask, does the party insist on keeping SAA? Why, in the face of every conceivable fact, that proves the exercise futile, is the party immovable? It is because low self-esteem is simply a stronger internal force than external rationality. The fear — that if the airline is closed, the conclusion that a “black government” is incapable and incompetent will inevitably follow — is greater than the perfectly logical alternative.

And so it persists. No matter the cost. No matter the damage. And it is, ironically, the most vicious of circles. Because every year, its absolute inability to run the airline is made more manifest. And it has nothing to do with race — just grand economic and managerial incompetence. The ANC cannot delink that, however, from its self-image. Thus, the loop is forever closed.

Don’t think that idea went away under Jacob Zuma. It was always there. In March, Zuma said, trying in part to explain away his removal, “Whenever someone says something which white people dislike, he is attacked by the white establishment using black people.”

He said he had argued with economists as to why SA fared worse than similar developing economies. “We were told that it was because we are thieves,” he said. “My problem with economists is they don’t tell us the truth. SA had apartheid and it isolated us from participating in the mainstream economy and education.”

A natural by-product of this is, of course, conspiracy, and it is why the ANC is rife with suggestions of subterfuge: the arms deal inquiry is a product of “fishers of corrupt men”; Thuli Madonsela is a CIA plant; “the West” is plotting to assassinate Jacob Zuma; the #FeesMustFall movement was stoked by a “third force”; the economy is in a dire condition because of “white monopoly capital”, and so on.

Politics without shame

Why is it so rare to see an ANC politician fall on their sword? Why is every indiscretion defended, every damning finding explained away, every compromised cadre “redeployed”? The answer is irrevocably linked to this observation: why is it that we have so rarely seen an ANC politician actually embarrassed? Someone who, when explaining their actions, cannot look at the camera and is manifestly gripped by remorse and regret?

It is simple enough: because shame and embarrassment do not really exist in the ANC. And, if you feel no shame, you never really feel sorry. In this way, you never really self-regulate. Those entirely political actions, which cannot be formally legislated for — like a resignation or public apology — are few and far between because they are born of a singular individual moral code. If you are merely a drone, in an army of drones, taking orders from the hive mind, then you are never really individually liable for anything.

The ANC notion of “collective responsibility” is one of the most damaging informal political ideas in SA today. It is total anathema to accountability.

Then-ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe best captured the weakness of the concept when he said of Tony Yengeni in 2003, “We give space to individual leaders to follow their conscience ... the ANC only moves in when your own conscience does not guide you properly.” He continued, “The ANC never abandons people. A saint is a sinner who is always trying to correct his ways.”

But Yengeni had no conscience when it came to his culpability. Why would he have? He said of the charges against him, “I have very, very early on dismissed those allegations with the contempt it deserves ... and I still do dismiss them.”

The ANC never guided him. To this day, Jessie Duarte says of his later conviction, “The conviction of comrade Tony Yengeni worries many in the ANC. What are we saying? If you negotiate a vehicle in this country you dare not negotiate a discount because that’s corruption?”

This attitude plays out in a hundred different ways. From those responsible for Life Esidimeni being re-elected to ANC lists, to the Nkandla debacle, to no-one resigning for the Travelgate scandal, to a thousand compromised and corrupt individuals being redeployed, to the most blatant moral and ethical lapses being explained away or defended.

So much of good ethical behaviour relies not on formal laws and regulation, but informal moral benchmarks. And those can only be established, enhanced or denuded by political parties themselves. In the ANC, individual personal responsibility is discouraged and decried in the name of such things as “discipline”. The result is a party full of people without a personal moral code, and thus incapable of shame or embarrassment, likewise contrition.

This impulse towards collective responsibility holds all comers in its grip. President Cyril Ramaphosa — today a manufactured metonym for the fight against corruption — said not days after Thuli Madonsela had released her report on Nkandla, “There was no corruption. Nothing to do with Nkandla was unlawful. The ‘firepool’ is not even as big as an Olympic swimming pool.”

His fight today, such as it is, is only possible because it is politically expedient to pursue it. When push comes shove, Ramaphosa like most in the ANC, will put the party line first.

The by-product of this shamelessness is the language of obfuscation and doubletalk, in the face of damning evidence. For example, a typical go-to explanation is to say, “we were not aware” of the problem. In an organisation where personal responsibility was the benchmark, this admission would be an unacceptable indictment in and of itself. In the ANC, it is a perfectly legitimate excuse.

Arrogance and contempt

The ANC, said Jacob Zuma — the embodiment of the majoritarian impulse that runs through the party — “is more important than the constitution”. That was in 1996, but it is an idea that resonates with many in the ANC today.

In 2006, a decade later, and referencing his earlier remark, Zuma said, “There are those who don’t know that and think that other things are more important than the ANC. If you are not loyal to the ANC, you can’t be loyal to anything else, even the constitution. If the ANC gets weak, there will be no SA.”

The ANC is primary. Psychologically, low self-esteem and egomania are so often two sides of the same coin. The latter is how you compensate for the former. In the ANC, the consequence is a party grown fat on power and constantly self-fed the narrative that today is no more than a continuation of its glorious history, that cannot comprehend the idea that the constitution sits above it.

The party’s irritation with the judiciary is almost palpable and Zuma, again, is the best illustration of it. Here he is, in 2009, on the chief justice: “If I sit here and I look at a chief justice of the Constitutional Court, you know, that is the ultimate authority, which I think we need to look at it because I don't think we should have people who are almost like God in a democracy ... Why are they not human beings? Because ... you can have a judge of whatever level making a judgment [and] other judges turning it and saying it was wrong. [This] just tells you they are not necessarily close to God. And therefore we have to look at it in a democratic setting; how do you avoid that?”

How it must irk so many in the ANC to have to defer to the courts. How regularly the ANC is shown up by them. Were you to map all the significant judgments that have gone against the ANC over the last 10 years, the composite list would cover just about every possible aspect of governance. But the ANC’s response is not shame or embarrassment, but anger and resentment because, how dare the courts?

The by-product of this is a war of attrition with the constitution itself. Where the constitution does not sanction ANC policy, it seeks to amend it. Where it cannot amend it, it ignores it. And where it cannot amend or ignore it, its members fight its every decision all the way up to the Constitutional Court, on any technicality they or the party can find. The impulse is to resist, not to introspect.

Jacob Zuma and his supporters have rarely, if ever, publicly opposed the actually findings in the Shaik judgment, which carefully documents how payments were made to Zuma, in exchange for favours. Their every argument is technical, about due process. That judgment alone should shame Zuma into resigning. Instead, it fuelled a bid for the presidency. It is the perfect illustration of this egomaniacal inversion of morality.

Why the ANC will never solve corruption

There are many formal processes under way at the moment, in the “new dawn” era of Cyril Ramaphosa, all cheered and welcomed, as SA’s obsession with formality continues to dominate its ability properly to gauge reality: a commission of inquiry into state capture, a new head of public prosecutions, a new police commissioner and so on.

As the ANC always does, it has captured public attention by focusing on systems and structures. Informally, it continues to run wild.

Remember, a year or so ago, there was the Moerane commission of inquiry into political assassinations in KwaZulu-Natal? It was hardly impressive. But it was something. It had no effect.

As part of its findings, it focused on the ANC’s internal culture, which obviously had something to do with much of this particular form of violence.

Here are two of its recommendations:

• “1190. The commission recommends that the state immediately take measures to depoliticise and professionalise the public service. The state must rebuild a public service that is driven by the politics of delivery and public service and not the politics of patronage and personal accumulation. The state must also take measures to immediately enforce the separation of powers, duties, and functions between public representatives and public officials and hold each accountable professionally and criminally for their respective conduct.”
• “1191. Government functionaries must, without exception, have the appropriate qualifications for the jobs that they are expected to perform in. Political deployment of persons as government functionaries into positions without the appropriate qualifications must be discouraged and eliminated as a practice.”

What action have you seen, from the ANC to recognise these recommendations, announce meaningful internal measures to comply with them, and report on their effect?

The answer, of course, is nothing. The commission was not ever designed to actually affect the way the ANC goes about its business. It was designed for its own sake — to generate a formal response to an organisational culture to which it has no solution. Today it can say it took action, and point to the commission. Likewise, today political assassinations continue unabated and, if anything, are spreading far beyond KwaZulu-Natal factional politics.

And so it is with almost everything to do with crime and corruption. The game plays itself out every day. The real problem — the ANC’s organisational culture — rarely, if ever, is the subject of actual public debate or pressure. And the ANC itself is caught up in its own denial.

The ANC will never solve corruption because its internal political culture is morally corrupt from first principles. And we don’t do first principles in SA.

There are various possible responses to this reality. Frustration and anger at the ANC’s unwillingness to introspect or change is perfectly legitimate, but dwell on it all a bit and there is something profoundly sad about the whole pretence. The ANC is a collection of deeply damaged, hugely fragile people who mask their insecurity with bluster and cover up their incompetence and criminality with appeals to respect and authority. It is an immensely powerful force for many inside the ANC, this facade, erected to negate honesty.

That is sad. For everyone else, the damage is now incalculable, at least in rand. But you will never pierce the veil, because to admit to a veil at all would bring the house down.