While the Zondo commission on state capture cannot bring us convictions of the corrupt, it has brought many other great things. Among the best and most important was the light shone into the black box of the ANC’s deployment policy over the past week.
There is no other single factor that is as responsible for the ANC’s failure to govern effectively over the past 25 years. The deployment of cadres has hollowed out the state and all its key institutions of expertise and objectivity, it has opened the door to corruption on a grand scale in state-owned enterprises, and it has collapsed the distinction between party and state and provided cover for widespread looting, from the highest political office in the land to the smallest town and municipality.
It is at the heart of the matter of state capture. And, while the ANC deployment committee has been given, in internal policy documents, the most ambitious mandate imaginable — “to deepen the hold of the liberation movement over the levers of the state” — it is not a constitutional ANC structure. Its makes no reports to conference and no public statements. Its deliberations have been a black box of secrecy, opened only occasionally to further some or other side in a factional battle.
Having committed to co-operate with the commission and support its work, the ANC wisely decided it would not be secretary-general Ace Magashule who would give testimony on its behalf. Instead, national chairperson Gwede Mantashe presented a detailed and remarkably frank affidavit, the spirit of which could not be faulted. He genuinely tried to assist the commission to understand how the ANC works.
But there was a logical hole at the centre of his evidence, which he refused to see and with which the commission will need to engage when it comes to write up this part of its deliberations and recommendations. Asked by advocate Alec Freund whether he endorsed the principle of a non-political civil service, Mantashe’s answer was an emphatic yes. Asked next whether he saw a tension between this and a civil service staffed by people loyal and accountable to the ANC, as envisaged by the ANC deployment policy, Mantashe’s response was an emphatic no.
His argument went along these lines. On returning from exile and taking power the ANC inherited a state where every director-general was a white male, mostly hostile to the ANC’s transformation agenda. It therefore had a responsibility to equip its members with the necessary skills and send them off to work in the state. As the deployment committee only recommends people for appointment and does not appoint, candidates must pass the selection processes in the state, which is the safeguard to ensure the appointment of skilled people.
This minimalist account of the deployment strategy was debunked not just by Freund, who aired a never-before-seen ANC deployment policy document approved in 2009, which spoke of the aims of deployment in far more sweeping and ambitious terms, but also by Mantashe’s fellow national executive committee member, Enoch Godongwana, in an hour-long interview on Newzroom Afrika the next day.
The unintended consequence of deployment, Godongwana said, was that unqualified and unaccountable people were now staffing the state. “What is undermining accountability is the creeping in of patronage under the guise of deployment ... There are [a] number of problems with deployment: factionalism is one; greed is another, where people are put in positions to get access to resources.”
This is distressingly clear in hundreds of examples, big and small, from deployed mayors and municipal managers in municipalities to the most sophisticated state-owned companies that now face ruin. Godongwana went on to hint that in the more pragmatic, liberal wing of the ANC there is a feeling that deployment has run its course and that the government is now focused on Senzo Mchunu’s plan to professionalise the civil service “as far as we can”.
The phrase “as far we can” was telling. Scrapping the deployment policy is not a debate that has reached the agenda of the ANC’s national executive committee. Nor is it likely to, without pressure. Patronage is the glue that holds the ANC together and it is the prize for contestation of position and power. Deployment is at the centre of the patronage machine, providing political cliques with access to state resources that allow them to remain there and get wealthy in the process.
When the commission makes its report it can recommend individuals for criminal prosecution. Whether that happens will depend on whether the National Prosecuting Authority can pull off the necessary convictions. It can also make recommendations on how to avoid the pitfalls of the past.
Scrapping ANC deployment committees will hopefully be one of them.
• Paton is editor at large.
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