Reading the newspapers you’d think President Cyril Ramaphosa had slipped into a phone booth and come out as Superman. Captain New Dawn. He’d privatised SAA, disciplined a senior cabinet minister enmeshed in a corruption scandal, wrestled another to the ground to deregulate energy policy and been photographed talking to the leaders of the free world at the Group of Seven (G-7) summit in Cornwall.
Ramaphosa is realist enough to know that politics changes in a flash and, like all politicians, he feeds off public approval. It is particularly important for him now. Ace Magashule, of the pro-Jacob Zuma daylight-robbery faction of the governing party, is secretary-general no more — suspended pending trial and delay, appeal and delay and then possibly an extended period in prison.
Ace, despite all the red lights flashed by our media friends over the past year, is gone. What now? Now can we fix the country? Sorry, too late. The government already knows everything. It’s on its own path to full employment in that sunlit industrial upland in the sky. Screw the little guy.
That doesn’t mean we shut down, watch the Lions tour, wait for a vaccination and a European holiday, no. There’s amusement to be had. How corrupt, for instance, are we really? It may be the wrong question. We might better ask what kind of corrupt are we. There’s new thinking on the subject and some corruption might even be useful.
A friend has introduced me to the most wonderful book: China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption, by Yuen Yuen Ang, a politics professor at the University of Michigan. I like her approach because she fights the temptation to look for simple answers, accepting that almost everything, even the obvious, can be complex.
Basically, she asks, if corruption is so toxic, why has China succeeded? She takes 15 countries and brings four almost species of corruption to measure them against — petty theft, grand theft, speed money and access money. A review in the LSE Review of Books suggests that Yuen means that while corruption may be a drug, different drugs have different effects.
So speed money — bribes to traffic cops or a licence official — is your pain killers. They ease the pain but ultimately damage the body. Petty and grand theft are toxic and poison the body, especially poor bodies. Access money, though, is different. It’s a steroid, the author suggests. It facilitates growth but raises inequality.
Yuen’s “score” tallies like this: the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia share a trait in that their dominant corruption is access money. It is institutionalised in the US through lobbying and revolving doors as people move between government and the private sectors. In China things revolve more around personal relationships, but the result is the same — access to opportunity.
“China managed to grow so fast because it could rein in the other three types of corruption,” says the LSE review of Yuen’s conclusion. “China’s fast economic growth over the past 40 years is remarkable. It is ... the most successful story of development in history. Still, inequality is rising.”
It’s obviously a book we need to read here in SA. We haven’t managed to rein in any of the lower forms of corruption. Not even close. And, in a way, we have completely cocked up the fourth and most dynamic form of corruption — access money — through factionalism in the governing party, the ANC.
The comrades hate each other so much that every time the presidency changes hands the entire body politic of the outgoing order is not only replaced but banished. The revolving door just doesn’t exist here. Maybe Yuen’s codifying of the relationship between growth and corruption is a help.
We will soon see an example of how awkward politics can be when trade, industry & competition minister Ebrahim Patel begins to create legal industrial quasi-cartels in SA to protect his “localisation” drive — a dishonest and ultimately doomed effort to protect uncompetitive companies by offering them protection from cheap imports in return for their “creating” jobs.
The captains of industry will happily take the first, but no sane or responsible CEO is coming out of this pandemic with anything but staying as cost-efficient as possible on their mind. For each job you “create” you need to carry five months’ salary in the bank. Does anyone in government know this?
But Patel is poised to “designate” 42 products — with some big company CEO support — for localisation any day now. Once designated (for supply to both the state and other local buyers), the manufacturers of these products will enjoy protection from imports that will deepen, rather than weaken, the “economic concentration” that Patel regularly rails against.
The designated 42, once they are artificially reconcentrated by localisation, will work together on everything from technology to prices (which will all rise). The minister will deny it, but he is building a new establishment and they all smell the same. It is all a far cry from the minister who bust the construction cartel back in 2012 after they had delivered five stadiums in two years for the 2010 World Cup. Perhaps it’s the new way to go. Cartels helped Japan industrialise after World War 2. Not for me, though.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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