The testimony presented so far in the judicial commission of inquiry into state capture paints a sordid picture of the brazen hijacking of the state by Gupta and company.
It is very disturbing how relatively easy this seems to have been. All the Guptas had to do was capture the heads or install their own puppets in the most important institutions and SOEs.
The architects of our democracy did a good job in designing a democratic state with strong support institutions. However, they could not ensure that these institutions would be led only by the upright.
How do you ensure that institutions, such as the Hawks, which demand impartiality are led and staffed by officials who are able to stand their ground in the face of untoward political pressure? How do you ensure that officials do not only stand their ground but continue to do their job to the best of their abilities in spite of the political atmosphere?
What is becoming painfully clear though is that, no matter how great the design of our institutions may be, if they are not occupied by people who possess the capacity and capability required by those institutions, they become useless, even destructive.
Whilst pen and paper may record the structure and intention of our institutions, we need something else to build the kind of people who must run these institutions. The political culture which has provided a fertile ground for state capture to flourish must be interrogated. It is this political culture which has shaped the actions that culminated in state capture.
The ruling party has to take responsibility for nurturing this destructive political culture. That political culture itself was inspired by a cruel era in our history, when the law, structures and institutions were re-purposed by the apartheid government to become instruments of repression, enemies of the people. However, this culture was supposed to have been disowned formally, consistently and wholeheartedly when we entered the era of democratic constitutionalism.
The brazen manner in which Major-General Zinhle Mnonopi is alleged to have tried to change Mcebisi Jonas’ testimony regarding attempts by the Gupta’s to bribe him points to something more than just dishonesty.
It points to an unspoken allegiance which makes considerations of the rule of law secondary, even to senior police officers like Mnonopi. This is allegiance to the political considerations of the ruling party. For people who have succumbed to this horrible culture, nothing comes before “the party”. It is as if “the party” is still fighting the apartheid government machinery, subverting it, when in fact, it now drives that machinery.
Driven by a culture which puts itself ahead of everything else, the ruling party tends to make everything else secondary to itself, including the rule of law.
The brazen strategy of the Guptas to install their own puppets in crucial positions, is a strategy borrowed directly from the ANC; cadre deployment. Even what these puppets are expected to do is similar, because they are expected to simply follow the instructions of their masters.
But whilst the ANC thought, only it, would play this game, it underestimated its own influence.
It is no wonder that a party which nurtured a culture of putting itself ahead of everything else, would ultimately create leaders who put themselves ahead of everything else.
It would ultimately create business people who put themselves ahead of everything else. It would create officials who do not care about the well-being of the country, but their own pay cheques. It would create citizens who feel they have to press for their own needs. So, the ruling party cannot in any way divorce itself from the Zuma era, the Guptas or their state capture project. The only way for the ANC to save and renew itself, would be if it simply put the country and the citizens first in every possible way.
So, whilst we welcome the quick action taken by the current Hawks head Godfrey Lebeya, to suspend Mnonopi pending investigations into the allegations, it remains pertinent upon us to discover and fully appreciate the underlying currents which made these crimes possible. If we emerge from this scandalous era of state capture with only prosecutions and arrests, but no insight into the underlying causes, we would have failed to exploit this crisis. Certainly, the horrible political culture of putting party political considerations above everything else must end...