The information about corruption in South Africa arising from the Madlanga inquiry and various other investigations such as the Special Investigating Unit’s work, illustrates the importance of formal and informal corruption networks and how they interact with the hierarchy in state institutions.
The Madlanga commission’s terms of reference talk directly to networks and hierarchies. The commission is enjoined to probe, report and make findings and recommendations to President Cyril Ramaphosa on whether criminal syndicates have infiltrated or exerted influence on state security institutions to facilitate organised crime.
Ramaphosa also urged the commission to investigate whether any member of his cabinet responsible for the criminal justice system is complicit in this infiltration or aided and abetted it.
But the commission hasn’t yet probed thoroughly how someone such as Vusimusi illustrates managed to set up and operate a network such as the one being exposed by the commission. Specifically, who really controls it? Aspects of this may eventually come in the commission’s reports.
The risk is that the commission’s work may end with Matlala. But if experience with such criminal networks from other countries is anything to go by, the highest-profile “leader” of such a network often turns out to be a mere mid-level boss. The ultimate boss always turns out to be a “respectable” member of society who controls the network from the shadows through underlings whose connections to him are difficult to trace.
In that sense, what’s been laid before the Madlanga commission offers a small window into corruption networks and their workings. Even if Matlala is charged, found guilty and imprisoned, the corruption network he ran could thus be rebuilt by its ultimate boss, laying the basis for a future commission of inquiry.
Even if Matlala is charged, found guilty and imprisoned, the corruption network he ran could thus be rebuilt by its ultimate boss, laying the basis for a future commission of inquiry.
Historian Niall Ferguson offers useful insights into networks and hierarchies throughout the ages, arguing that history hasn’t done justice to the role and importance of networks. “Most history is hierarchical: it’s about emperors, presidents, prime ministers and field marshals. It’s about states, armies and corporations. It’s about orders from on high. Even history ‘from below’ is often about trade unions and workers’ parties,” he says about his book, The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and The Struggle for Global Power.
That’s no accident. History has turned out this way because hierarchical institutions have always created the archives that historians use to write history. Social networks, which Ferguson argues could be sources of power and drivers of change, tend not to leave behind archives. That’s why probes into corruption offer a rare opportunity to document these networks and their workings. But only if they are structured properly, a point made recently by advocate Muzi Sikhakhane.
Diversions
My brother from another mother recently said commissions of inquiry as currently structured in South Africa were a diversion by politicians from “the real issues”. The first hurdle is the legislative framework for commissions of inquiry, since the founding legislation was passed in 1947. The second is that lawyers aren’t best equipped to get to the truth.
All of which leaves one conclusion: in the case of the brief Ramaphosa gave Madlanga and his team, sociologists and anthropologists might be better placed to map how a Matlala (and his syndicate) can infiltrate and corrupt the country’s security hierarchy, administrative and political.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and South African Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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