EDITORIAL: SA owes so much to the good people it had in key institutions

If ever there was a lesson that institutions are only as good as the people who lead them it is in the Zondo commission’s long-awaited fourth report.

One stark contrast that emerges from the report’s many hundreds of tortuously detailed pages is between the Treasury, whose leadership waged a successful battle against efforts to capture the public purse, and Eskom, which eventually succumbed to state capture.

The report dates this to 2014, when the Gupta family finally gained a grip on Eskom’s board and management, and pays less attention to the battles fought by good people at Eskom to avoid efforts to capture it in the early years of president Jacob Zuma’s administration. But they were driven out in the end and we are still living with the catastrophic results.

The Zondo report identifies R14.7bn worth of Gupta-linked contracts that were corruptly awarded. But the true cost of capture, at Eskom and at so many other state entities, was incalculable. State-owned enterprises and the state itself were hollowed out, with corruption and capture driving out many people of integrity and experience. They were replaced, often, with deployees who were neither honest nor competent.

Along with that were the billions of rand that were corruptly and inappropriately spent — billions that could and should have been used on better and more cost-effective infrastructure and services for SA. That Eskom and Transnet are struggling now to keep the lights on, the trains running and the ports functioning is in part a consequence of those state capture years — though those entities and the government still need to be held accountable for their failure to turn them around in the years since.

The Zondo report details how, fortunately for SA, the Treasury managed to stand up to efforts to capture it over a crucial period. During this time, Zuma and his cronies put huge pressure on finance ministers Nhlanhla Nene and Pravin Gordhan, and their senior officials, to support corrupt contracts — particularly the planned nuclear procurement deal with Russia — that would have bankrupted SA for decades to come. And as the commission details, when Nene would not do their bidding or Zuma’s, the Guptas unsuccessfully tried to bribe then deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas to take the job instead.

SA owes a debt of gratitude to those political leaders who stood firm. But the commission makes it clear that it owes just as much to officials such as former Treasury director-general Lungisa Fuzile and his team, who refused to sign off on the nuclear deal, as well as other corrupt and hugely costly deals such as those brought to them by the captured boards of SAA and Denel. Indeed, one of the takeaways from the story Zondo tells is how crucial the role and integrity of the accounting officer are — in a government department, the director-general.

After four years and thousands of pages, we now really need an executive summary of the Zondo findings that synthesises them into a coherent narrative with some crisp conclusions about what happened and why it happened. In particular, SA needs to see two sets of outcomes out of this long and costly process.

First, it urgently needs to see prosecutions. The National Prosecuting Authority surely cannot procrastinate any longer. The fourth report adds to a growing list of recommended prosecutions, putting Tony Gupta in the firing line for the attempt to capture the Treasury and identifying former executives Brian Molefe, Anoj Singh and Matshela Koko as targets for prosecution at Eskom. Zuma’s complicity is one of the themes running through the report though, disappointingly, it did not manage to pin corruption in the Free State on Ace Magashule.

But the second outcome SA needs to see from the Zondo process is clear proposals on how to ensure that state capture cannot happen again. That will require institutional reforms. But it will also require that safeguards be put in place to make sure the right people are put in the right jobs in the state — and that they are steadfastly honest.