— 01/23/2008
DEMOCRACY TO KLEPTOCRACY IN FOUR YEARS FLAT
Paul Trewhela
A Russian tale read backwards
Four years: that's how long it took for the government of the African National Congress, nominally under President Nelson Mandela but effectively run by his Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki, to get into the real business of corruption, of self-enrichment of leading politicians and the ruling party. Mbeki appears not to have been guilty of personal corruption, as the Defence Minister and his exile comrade, Joe Modise, almost certainly was; but he has a case to answer in relation to what he knew, what he himself organised, and what he arranged to be provided corruptly and illegally, at the public expense, to fund the ANC (thus to ensure his continuance in office for ten years, as President). If Mbeki resembles Putin in his obsession with power and secretiveness, the great nexus of corruption in the arms deal scandal of 1998/99 under Mbeki's remit created the context for a re-run in reverse of the post-Soviet script in Russia, with a Yeltsin succeeding to a Putin in the presidency of the ANC (as Mondli Makhanya has argued). From the old National Executive Committee of the ANC to the new NEC elected last month, South Africa has made the transition from corruption secretively and autocratically hidden to a kleptocracy naked, open, and unashamed. (It is called 'transformation'). On the NEC the convicted fraudster Yengeni sits beside the accused but so far unconvicted Zuma in deciding the fate of the nation. As in Russia, Stalin is as Stalin does.
 
An autocratic state in exile comes home to roost
These people never had any interest in the niceties of constitutional rule, or the slightest real experience of it. All their adult lives in exile they were institutionalised at public expense (the Russian state, the Swedish state and other donors provided them with their incomes) and they ruled like Caesars over their cowed subjects. Apartheid despotism has its alter ego in ANC despotism: where else did an Essop Pahad, the Minister in the Presidency, learn such bad manners? When the electorate in Khutsong burns the houses of ANC councillors because of its frustration at not getting its viewpoint attended to, it correctly identifies the source of the problem. Black people in South Africa have a long and rich experience of being dictated to, and it has not been difficult for them to discover that new master is old master untransformed. When irate passengers burnt train carriages this month because power cuts had brought their journeys to a halt, they identified precisely as the cause of their distress the all-arregating, all-arrogant government, their supposed benefactor, now daily revealed as incompetent as well as unreachable.
 
Despotism ensconced in the electoral law
Violence in Khutsong and on the railway track is the old violence of the oppressed from the apartheid period. It is the violence, learnt over decades, of a people for whom the avenues of civic expression of dissatisfaction have been blocked at source. The electoral law, crafted in secret conclave by the ANC and the National Party in the dying months of apartheid, was designed to create an unaccountable executive in Parliament and the provinces, for which the elected MPs and provincial councillors would be so much voting fodder. Every ANC MP is a slave to the party list, at the beck and call of the party bosses at Chief Albert Luthuli House in Johannesburg (a travesty of the memory of that fine gentleman) who are as much a despotic power over Parliament as Simon Legree with his whip, in the cotton fields of the Deep South. But as Abe Lincoln knew and taught, you cannot fool all the people all the time.
 
A Russian (and a German) fairy tale
Its accountability secured through a bad electoral law, the well-fed vulture of exile came home to richer pickings. This electoral law, with its despotic party list, is the one element in the Constitution these predators will not wish to tamper with, as the waves of rhetoric now hit the rocks and reality obtrudes above the hype. The Rainbow Nation reveals itself as Criminal Nation, from the criminals in Parliament and high office in the state to the criminals on the rampage throughout township and suburb, criminals high and low. And the response of the ANC to this daily, progressive disintegration of society? Dismember the judiciary. Lock up the press. Soon it must come to similar Russian measures against the ruling coven’s critics and dissenters, as these liberators of the public purse let the country go to hell while they line their own pockets at public expense. So what if the school system is failing, if the hospitals are a danger to patients, if no one is safe in his house let alone on the streets, while the country regresses to candle power. Instead of stable development of electric power, the rapacity and stupidity of the arms deal. Instead of functioning schools, unwanted and over-priced weapons. Instead of a decent health system, with adequate care for all, another debt-laden extravanza to be laid on with the World Cup, so that the ruling politicos can swagger and preen themselves in public and private at everyone else’s expense. Guns before butter indeed!