We need to begin thinking about what the returns would be on the investment of more than R1bn in the Zondo Commission of Inquiry while finishing touches are being made to the report. No doubt, given how much evidence had been collected, collated, evaluated, tested and now being synthesised, the report will be dense and vast. But what exactly are we waiting on? What will success look like?
As a country, the most important response to the years of state capture is for there to be accountability first, and insights and recommendations on how to prevent a repeat of such brazen and callous hollowing of the state.
Without accountability the investment in this judicial inquiry will not have been worth it. Of course, the commission’s job cannot be conflated with that of the National Prosecuting Authority. But the commission has moral, legal and political authority, quite apart from a huge forensic team that has been working pointedly, and in a sustained manner, on getting to the bottom of the theft of large parts of the SA state.
Success therefore would mean a magisterial final report that offers an evidential basis for prosecutors to move quickly in getting the big state capture fish to be hauled before the courts with good prospects of successful prosecution. If we do not see men and women behind bars because of the impact of the work of the Zondo commission (in terms of what it enables prosecutors to do), then the resources that went into the commission would have been unfortunate in a country with a democracy that desperately needs to be strengthened with effective oversight mechanisms.
We have to frame the public narrative around the impending report squarely in relation to the question of express legal accountability on the part of the culprits who have been named and implicated.
It is likely that the report will defer to the Hawks and NPA for further investigation where the body of evidence is inconclusive, but that should not be a reason to delay quick and easy (but important) wins early on, where the body of evidence is incontrovertible.
Legal accountability is not the only way to ensure there are consequences for wrongdoing. As a society we must also use the report as a basis for a renewed social contract across our usual differences that never again will we be tardy when rotten politicians, in cahoots with private interests and private capital, steal from us with impunity.
The report will be good if it is lucid in how it sets out the story of the methods used by the big fish to hollow out the state. Legalese can be technical and yawn-inducing if you are not legally trained. It is important ordinary South Africans are able to make sense of how it is that billions of rands were stolen from us. We cannot know what the red flags are when watching what is going on inside the state unless we are fluent in the language and behaviour of the thieves themselves.
This means that while the final report being typed up right now is, at its core, a legal document, one would hope acting Chief Justice Raymond Zondo will make sure it is translated before it is released into the public space so it does not read like a legal tome but more like a document any interested and active citizen can make sense of to make more informed decisions about how they engage the state and, hopefully, expand their voting criterion and ask and expect more from political hopefuls.
Finally, the role of the media in January matters. The entire report is going to be important but we will have to avoid click bait. If, for example, someone we know appears in the report but does so fairly innocuously and parenthetically with no findings against them, it will be irresponsible to drag them to the front page of a newspaper when the real story lies elsewhere, even if it is less sexy than going after titbits that can sell newspapers or get eyeballs on website landing pages.
We have a duty to be accurate, not just to be quoting accurately, but also thinking carefully about the report and asking such questions as: what are the most important conclusions drawn? Who are the big fish at the heart of the findings? What systematic and institutional analyses can be drawn from the report? Am I about to write a report that is in the public interest or merely of interest to the public?
Editorial teams will have to be strategic in how to spend their prime media real estate in ways that prioritise the scale of damage and depth of implication, and not just go for quick, low-hanging fruit big names that weren’t necessarily engineers of the rot.
This report is going to be of huge importance to us as we rebuild our young and battered democracy. It would be hugely irresponsible if we were not to start preparing right now for how we will sift through it when it lands in the next few weeks. In fact, the report should get more media houses preparing for its landing than for the ANC January 8 celebrations, for instance.
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