Imagine Bathabile Dlamini, the former social development minister, being appointed to chair the board of the National Development Agency or any state-owned enterprise (SOE), for that matter. There would be a huge outcry.
On July 1, the government appointed David Makhura, an ANC national executive committee (NEC) member, to join the board of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) as an independent nonexecutive director. The idea is that Makhura, the former premier of Gauteng, will take over the chair of the board of this development finance institution in three months.
To be clear, Dlamini and Makhura are different, but they also have stark similarities. The former has been convicted by the courts before. The latter hasn’t.
Both are, however, active members of the ANC, the senior partner in the government of national unity (GNU). Makhura is 10th on the list of additional NEC members and was active in the talks leading up to the formation of the GNU and the ANC’s coalition strategy.
Makhura isn’t the first ANC cadre to be deployed to an SOE. Yet, he brings unique problems to the job.
He is following in the footsteps of a long list of other ANC deployees. The list includes Jay Naidoo (former minister in Nelson Mandela’s cabinet) and, most recently, Ebrahim Rasool, former Western Cape premier and now disgraced former SA ambassador to the US.
The key difference with Makhura’s predecessors is that they were all out of active politics. There was daylight between their political careers and tenure as business leaders. He is still active.
Makhura would probably take comfort in the fact that he is not the first. Cyril Ramaphosa, his party boss, chaired a board of a strategic SOE.
During his nine-year presidential tenure, Jacob Zuma introduced a new iteration of cadre deployment. As part of patronage for his alliance partners, he inserted trade unionists, like Zwelinzima Vavi (former Cosatu general secretary) and Frans Baleni (former general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers), into boards of SOEs such as the Industrial Development Corporation and Eskom.
Times were different then. The ANC was fully in charge and could willy-nilly dispense patronage without question.
To be fair to Makhura, Ramaphosa chaired a board of an SOE while he continued serving on the ANC NEC, but not as one of its key officials. Lines have since been blurred.
Also, when Ramaphosa fulfilled this role, he was an ordinary NEC member, not an official like Makhura.
As well as succeeding Rasool, who got expelled as our ambassador to the US, Makhura will join another ANC luminary, Joel Netshitenzhe, on the DBSA board. Unlike him, though, Netshitenzhe, who runs a think-tank, is no longer in active politics. He joined the board in 2023 and serves on other private sector boards.
The Makhura saga reveals a few things. First, the ANC, which lost its dominance last May, has run out of patronage. And its cadres have yet to internalise this. In provinces, municipalities and the national government, serving officials continue to be asked for deployments.
Up until 2022, the strategy was to strengthen Luthuli House. It boggles the mind why the party’s second deputy secretary-general has a full-time government job.
Second, why did the DA, the ANC’s co-governing partner, never oppose Makhura’s deployment with all the clear conflicts of interest during cabinet discussions? Is it, perhaps, possible that the DA was still sulking after the sacking of Andrew Whitfield?
And worse, is it possible that the DA, which has challenged the ANC’s cadre deployment policy, has entered into a “you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours” pact with the ANC around cadre deployment?
Whatever the answers are to these troubling questions, the ultimate responsibility lies with Makhura, the ANC and Ramaphosa’s government.
Makhura has to choose between DBSA and the ANC. Ramaphosa has to help him with this choice. The government can’t be used to subsidise a political party.
If Ramaphosa sees nothing wrong in Makhura holding both positions, then we’re in more trouble than we think.
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