Publication: The Weekender Issued: Date: 2007-01-27 Reporter: Editorial Reporter:

SA’s Arms Deal the Opening Act in the Greek Tragedy of the ANC

 

Publication 

The Weekender

Date

2007-01-27

Reporter

 Editorial

Web Link

www.bday.co.za

 

While the voting public may forgive the party’s callow greed, history will find that Thabo Mbeki should have known better

The issue of corruption within government is at last shifting from the periphery to the centre. Hallelujah. As last week’s Financial Mail (FM) brilliantly and trenchantly asserts, the African National Congress (ANC) has traded its idealism for influence. The article quotes one disgruntled ANC member as saying: “We no longer have an ANC leadership. We have an ANC dealership."

The FM estimates that 40% of ANC MPs in Parliament are directors of companies. Most members of the ANC’s head office are also involved in business. The national executive has several ultra-rich members involved in business or, in the case of several cabinet ministers, whose spouses are business high-flyers.

The Financial Mail quotes ANC secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe as saying that corruption is far worse than anyone imagines. “This rot is across the board. It’s not confined to any level or any area of the country. Almost every project is conceived because it offers opportunities for certain people to make money," he says.

How did this all come about? The obvious answer is that as soon as the ANC adopted black economic empowerment as its official policy, it in effect legitimated “going into business" as acceptable. But the advent of empowerment is only a partial explanation. Although it is true that empowerment is the deliberate transfer of wealth outside its normal course, it’s relatively easy to distinguish a genuine empowerment transaction from an act of tender fraud. Only the willfully blind could contrive to believe that a rigged tender could ever be justified as empowerment ­ even though we know this happens all the time.

Neither was it inevitable that politicians should assume they would be the object of empowerment’s largesse. The process of legitimising the notion that working politicians could simultaneously become “businessmen” was not inevitable; it had to be sanctioned from above. And that implicit sanction took place with something called the arms deal.

The roots of this tragedy go back to the early ’90s, when responsibility for arms procurement was handed to the then deputy president, Thabo Mbeki. Even then, our chess-playing president had a calculated notion of what such a deal could achieve; job creation, industrialisation and a military presence that would boost SA’s diplomatic influence. It also, not accidentally, made it necessary for him to talk turkey with the leaders of Europe, offering them the tantalising prospect of a deal ­ and implicitly a deal-making president. It all seemed so promising.

Yet, at the very least, he was naive. Having started the ball rolling, it gathered a momentum of its own, attracting moths of every description to the flame. The trial of Schabir Shaik lifts only a corner on the back-room scramble for a slice, but it’s obvious that the internal squabbling was frantic. The effect of this initial foray into money-grubbing trickled down through the ranks, with excluded parties wondering why they were being left out. In a way, the advent of empowerment as official policy in 2001 was a response to precisely this pressure.

When the first indications of corruption were brought to light, the ANC tried half-heartedly to do the right thing. The auditor-general and other bodies were asked to investigate but their findings were transparently inept. How inept is gradually becoming clear, as new investigations gradually progress in Britain, France and Germany.

But the point was not missed by the ANC rank and file. To every member, the state of play was now obvious. First, doing business and being a politician was okay because if the higher-ups were doing it, they could hardly complain if the lower ranks did it too. And second, if you were found out, the ANC would contrive a way to defend you.

And so the arms deal has become the ANC’s Greek tragedy ­ the tracks of its future were written in its past. SA’s voting public might forgive the ANC its callow greed, but history will not. And its merciless finding will be this: Thabo Mbeki should have known better.

With acknowledgements to The Weekender.