How far can deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo go in his final report into state capture? And how far will he go?
As the commission has turned in recent weeks to focus more closely than anyone anticipated on the workings of the ANC, the question arises as to whether Zondo can or will go down the road of giving the party advice on how to reform in the wider interest of a less corruption-prone society.
The ANC is beginning to show signs of anxiety at this unexpected turn of events. In his closing remarks at the commission after two days of evidence last week President Cyril Ramaphosa reminded Zondo that “the mandate of the commission does not extend to how political parties must function — that it is the sole prerogative of political parties themselves to determine their own organisational arrangements”.
ANC treasurer-general Paul Mashatile also wrote an opinion piece in Business Day to coincide with Ramaphosa’s testimony, making the case for why the ANC still needs a deployment committee 27 years after the dawn of democracy.
Zondo himself has shown a good deal of personal interest in the ANC’s inner workings and participated actively in the questioning, asking about deployment policy, internal disciplinary processes and the party’s flagrant disregard of its own and the country’s constitution.
At first glance the terms of reference would seem not to extend to the dealings of political parties. However, the evidence leaders have taken a wide interpretation of the brief, and as advocate Paul Pretorius said to Ramaphosa at the start of the questioning, the objective of the commission as he sees it is to establish what happened, how it happened and what to do to prevent it from happening again.
With this framework in mind it could not be more fitting that the inquiry has arrived, after 20 months of testimony, at the door of the ANC. It has been abundantly clear to anyone who cared to give the problem of corruption in SA some thought that certain practices, policies and beliefs in the ANC have collaborated to provide not only fertile conditions, but outright opportunity to plunder state resources.
The policy of the deployment of ANC activists to key positions in the public service and independent organs of state, the policy of BEE, which has been leveraged through state procurement and the issuing of licences, and the system of party political funding, in which those who benefit from state contracts are expected to pay back both to corrupt officials and the ANC, have together formed a circle of patronage and corruption that has been hugely beneficial to the party financially — and to those with political connections.
It is a system the ANC has resisted reforming, and one it will not want to change. One element has thankfully been dislodged. The Political Party Funding Act, which was pushed through the Zuma parliament by a handful of ANC MPs while the rest were busy faction fighting, requires the disclosure of all donations above R100,000 and limits the amount from any one donor to R15m a year. When Ramaphosa came into office it was already on his desk. But he only took the final steps to put it in place three years later, as civil society organisations were preparing papers to take him to court.
A second element is the deployment policy. Like ANC chair Gwede Mantashe, Ramaphosa defended the ongoing need for a deployment committee, insisting it made only recommendations, not appointments. It therefore did not interfere with official selection processes. Zondo gently tried persuading Ramaphosa of the advantage a candidate endorsed by the deployment committee, headed by the ANC deputy president, would have, particularly when the appointment decision was in the hands of a cabinet minister. Equally gently and with a laugh, Ramaphosa evaded the question, saying that was not what happened in practice.
Zondo also tried to alert Ramaphosa to the obvious problem with the ANC’s reluctance to discipline its members when they were accused of offences, explaining that every company and institution had internal disciplinary procedures, which they implemented separately from the processes of the law. Oh no, Ramaphosa laughed, that could not be done in the ANC, people in the ANC would not accept that at all.
So Ramaphosa, who started off his testimony with a promise not to “defend the indefensible”, defended the system of patronage and corruption his party has created that gave rise to state capture in the first place. This he did while saying that the ANC was sorry, so very sorry, for the corruption that has ravaged the state for the past decade.
• Paton is editor at large
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