JONNY STEINBERG: Crucial decisions by Mbeki at the root of state capture

On the cusp of his 80th birthday former president Thabo Mbeki has rolled up his sleeves and is getting stuck into ANC business. Many have greeted this autumnal renewal of his energy with enthusiasm. His tenure as president is widely regarded as the last time sanity and seriousness characterised SA governance. If he could sprinkle some of the residues of that past over the present, some believe, there may be hope.

I think history has thus far let Mbeki off too lightly. He is far more implicated in SA’s current quagmire than many believe. In the end, two things made state capture possible. The first was the disabling of the justice system, giving licence to systemic corruption. The second was the architectural design of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which permitted them to be captured.

Both of these failures have their origins in decisions made by Mbeki. True, anybody can make mistakes, and nobody can anticipate all the consequences of their actions. But the mistakes Mbeki made were, at the deepest level, a reflection of his character and of his fundamental inadequacies as a leader.

With regard to the justice system, Mbeki had a simple, albeit tough, choice. He could either guard the independence of the justice system with vigour, setting a precedent for generations to come, or he could wield it as a weapon in his endeavour to control the ANC. He chose the latter, systematically putting people he could control in key justice system positions.

When push came to shove and an official tried to act independently, Mbeki fired him. Case in point: director of public prosecutions Vusi Pikoli was summarily dismissed when he went after another Mbeki appointee, the scurrilously corrupt police commissioner Jackie Selebi.

Counterfactuals are difficult, I know, but had Mbeki not treated the justice system thus we may be living in a different world now. He set a dire precedent; after him, his successor had licence to do what Mbeki did, moulding a justice system in his own interests.

What of the SOEs? Mbeki’s original intention was to privatise them. He got as far as Telkom, then changed his mind. He correctly judged that SA’s economic fate lay in its capacity to develop its infrastructure. He incorrectly judged that the state could go it alone.

What might have happened had Mbeki restructured and partly sold off utilities? One must be careful in erecting this particular counterfactual. Privatisation is not an antidote to corruption. We know from bitter recent experience that world-renowned professional services firms and respectable corporations are happy to steal on a grand scale if they can. We can also speculate that the process of privatisation itself would have been explosively controversial and deeply corrupt.

Given all those caveats, it is nonetheless hard to imagine that state capture would have been possible in the absence of the framework left behind by Mbeki. He left a presidency with the unfettered power to appoint the CEOs and the boards of SOEs as well as the ministers and directors-general who might have prevented their crimes. Had he restructured these enterprises, the Guptas could not have come to control them via the presidency.

It may be protested that Mbeki could hardly have foreseen the kleptocratic appetite of his successor. But that is to miss the point. The governance structures he bequeathed — of the justice system and of the SOEs — presumed Mbeki himself in the presidency. They presumed an excessively wise, omniscient president with the power to decide everything that happens next.

This is the institutional legacy of an insecure man who could not imagine anybody but himself exercising power; a man who built institutions not for a future in which he was gone, but for a perpetual present.

One wonders whether Mbeki is going about his work of repair with a feeling of remorse. I doubt it. He probably has no idea that he is the one who made such a mess.

• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.