ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe has dismissed attempts to use regime change and white monopoly capital as scapegoats for state capture by the Gupta family.
President Jacob Zuma had used a dodgy intelligence report — alleging former finance minister Pravin Gordhan and his deputy Mcebisi Jonas were lobbying business support for regime change in SA — to justify his removal of the pair.
National Treasury under their leadership was at the forefront of the battle against the allegations of state capture, rent-seeking and corruption by the Gupta family.
Mantashe’s diagnostic report, to be delivered on Friday afternoon at the ANC policy conference that has just got under way at Nasrec, said “linking regime change to state capture reflects the decline in our analytical capacity”.
The report is scathing on state capture, saying the Gupta e-mails were damaging the movement and individual leaders fingered in them must explain themselves.
“The series of e-mails that are released in tranches each day cause more harm to the movement. Our reaction cannot be careless, but it needs to be comprehensive.
“Where we must own up, individual comrades should do so by providing reputable explanation, as a few have done. Blatant denial lacks credibility in the eyes of society,” he said.
Mantashe said the public outcry about the influence of the family had led to investigations by the public protector and the South African Council of Churches in which “serious allegations” were made against senior leaders.
“Instead of dealing with the reality facing the movement, a defence was developed by using the real threats we face as a movement. A narrative was developed to link any discomfort with the influence of the Gupta family to the regime change agenda.
“While it must be acknowledged that regime change is a real threat that needs to be analysed, and a strategy to defend the country and the movement needs to be developed, this cannot be used as a response to the perception or reality of corruption.
“Another defence that has been bandied about is the one that counter-poses the behaviour of this family to (white) monopoly capital,” he said.
The narrative was bandied about as if it was a “new phenomenon” instead of recognising that this was at the heart of the “revolution”.
“A related disadvantage of this narrative is that it uses the lowest common denominator by comparing revolutionaries to the apartheid state.
“If we are comparable, then we must accept that corruption is therefore systemic in our movement, as was the case with the apartheid state,” Mantashe says in the report.
The “white monopoly capital” narrative emanated from the UK-based PR company Bell Pottinger to deflect attention from their clients the Gupta family.
Electoral prospects
The report also says the ANC knew that its electoral prospects were waning before the 2016 local elections, with its own research confirming that less than 50% of the population was positive about the direction in which the country was headed.
The report offers a frank assessment of the reasons for the decline of the organisation.
Factors such as the Cabinet reshuffle in which Nhlanhla Nene was axed, the constitutional court decision on Nkandla, the spy tapes judgment, protests in Vuwani, Tshwane and the Western Cape and the challenges at state-owned entities were all factors contributing to the trust deficit between the people and the party, ANC research had shown.
“In the run-up to the 2016 local government elections, our research confirmed that less than 50% of the population was positive about the direction the country was taking,” it was noted in the report.
The ANC’s support in the 2016 election slipped nearly 10% to 53.9%, and its also lost three metros and a handful municipalities.
The research shows that leaders and members of the ANC itself are generally negative about their own organisation, with public pronouncements from leaders themselves communicating a message that the party cannot be trusted.
In the report, Mantashe concedes that when opposition parties exploit the party’s weaknesses, the leadership reacts by either “balking under pressure” or “displaying arrogance”.
“The fact that in order to correct basic mistakes, sometimes genuine mistakes, we get directed by courts, communicates a message of a movement that does not know the difference between right and wrong,” the report reads.
As a result, judicial overreach occurs, which is unhealthy for democracy, he says. “We are fast drifting towards “lawfare” …. It is about the abuse of the law and our judicial systems to undermine the very systems they stand for.
“This is amplified by the media, which relate this false guilt and create a psychological situation where this becomes the truth.”
He further concedes that arrogance has opened the ANC up to abuse — and that this was a manifestation of internal factions at war with each other in the party.
Mantashe says the dominant faction — which is the group currently aligned to Zuma — “becomes reluctant to listen to different views in the organisation”.
Zuma on state capture
Zuma raised the issue of state capture in his opening address.
The debate about the capture of the state required a thorough analysis of the South African economy in order to be understood it the correct context, he said.
Access to state power and resources by some in the party had led to perceptions and allegations that the ANC was corrupt.
Zuma agreed with the scathing findings of the pre-election research report. He conceded the report had “proved to be correct”. But although it had found that perceptions in society were that “we are soft on corruption, concerned about self-service and that the ANC is arrogant”, Zuma said his party still needed to get to the bottom of the state capture problem.
He even welcomed the commission of inquiry that he is to set up as the country's president.
Not only that, but that his party still needed to diagnose the loss of major metropolitan cities as well as what had gone wrong in the party, he said.
“It is critical for us to discuss the impact on the organisation of the ANC being in government and our cadres having access to state power and resources.
"The access to state power and resources has led to perceptions and allegations that the ANC is a corrupt organisation given allegations of wrongdoing with regards to state tenets.”
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