There has been great public interest in the phenomenon dubbed “state capture” since the revelation of the Gupta influence on ministerial and other senior institutional leadership appointments.
This is rightly so because the collusion of business and public representatives in ways that advance their personal and business interests over public good, cripples the state from effectively delivering on its transformative socioeconomic mandate.
However, the spotlight shone on the negative impact of the Gupta-Zuma relationship took attention away from the capture of institutions in the other spheres of government.
The VBS saga facilitated a moment when the country was forced to confront the extent of looting of state resources across government. While we know state capture is not new to SA, we are still not asking ourselves why it happened?
Why do public-spirited individuals behave in ways that undermine the very ideals for which they strived and for which some endured torture and years in prison or exile?
The narrative that continues to associate state capture with Zuma is a lazy one. I am not arguing – as Zuma does – that state capture does not exist; it certainly exists and it has disastrous consequences for a country with an economy of our size and a deep apartheid legacy to confront.
What I am saying is that in defaulting to a Gupta-Zuma narrative we miss opportunities of understanding the underlying causes of this phenomenon. We are not interrogating what it is that we need to do to ensure that the next leaders are not as vulnerable to state capture as others have been.
For example, dumping all blame at Zuma’s door absolves the cabinet and parliament of the critical active role they played in supporting state capture. The evidence given by many at the Zondo Commission points to a shocking complicity of both, and to their support for some of the absurd decisions that were geared towards plundering our economy.
Did we really need nuclear enrichment if indications were that it would collapse the economy? Why didn’t any cabinet members resign in protest if their voice of reason within cabinet was being drowned out by the Zuma loyalists? Why didn’t parliament listen to the public outcry? Why was parliament unable to hold the executive to account?
We are not having conversations about the calibre of our members of parliament (MPs), the cult-like culture within political parties and the impact this has on MPs’ ability to exercise their oversight roles without fear or favour.
It took the Constitutional Court to educate parliamentarians of their duty to the people of SA and their mandate in at least two cases; the Nkandla case and the vote of no confidence case in which the UDM asked the court to determine if the Speaker of the National Assembly had the power to determine if a vote in parliament could be by secret ballot.
So we saw in the past few years that our MPs did not really understand their constitutional mandate, and were unable (or unwilling) to hold the executive to account.
Is this not a moment where we should be having conversations about our electoral process, exploring ways of strengthening the process through which cabinet and other senior institutional leaders are elected and thereby strengthening accountability?
Is there need for constitutional reform in ways that review the powers conferred on the president to appoint senior leaders of key institutions, in particular crime-fighting agencies? Are there meaningful ways in which we can hold business to account and demand that money derived with our borders be invested back in ways that strengthen our domestic economy?
These questions linger as we fail to have a meaningful public conversation around state capture. Instead, we have allowed political parties to turn this into a political fracas and for the media to turn it into a profit-driven sensational moment.
This narrow focus serves the interest of business in that we are caught up in the drama and are failing to hold business to account for its historic and ongoing role in state capture. In failing to deliberate on effective ways of raising the bar around ethical standards reflective of corporate citizenship we fall too short of getting to “the heart of the beast”.
The greatest negative impact of state capture is felt by local communities across the country. The greatest looting of state resources has not been in the amounts of money involved in the Gupta-Zuma nefarious activities over the years, but in the irregular, improper and useless use of state resources by local municipalities.
The audit outcomes in just the last financial year paint a bleak picture of the performance of municipalities across the country, with the Eastern Cape being among the provinces with the highest number of worst-performing municipalities.
The auditor-general’s report claims this regression in audit outcomes can be attributed to lack of consequences and disregard for the rule of law, poor capacity, poor leadership and lack of effective oversight and accountability mechanisms.
To understand the depth of this problem one must locate it in context.
Many municipalities in the Eastern Cape have little revenue-generating capacity and depend on the equitable share, loans and conditional grants.
They use a huge bulk of their equitable share to service their ever-ballooning salary bill and the conditional grants and loans for service delivery. Misappropriation of the conditional grants and whatever money is left from the equitable share after operational expenses are paid for, means that many of these municipalities are unable to deliver services. Treasury also indicated that in the last financial year, almost R60bn was spent on consultancy services by government.
While one somewhat understands the rationale behind the neo-liberal policy agenda of the ruling party, government’s inability to devise effective mechanisms to ensure that its active stimulation of economic growth through contracting ultimately results in greater investment in the domestic economy.
Government has failed dismally to do this. So, the bulk of this R60bn is in foreign bank accounts as the companies that receive the biggest contracts are non-South African with foreign shareholders.
It serves the interest of political parties to drive this neo-liberal agenda at a time where funding for political parties is dwindling.
There are examples where money flows from a municipality through a consultancy agreement and finds its way into the bank accounts of the political party. This is what state capture is about. It is the collusion of business and politicians to loot from the state, thereby diverting resources from public good towards political and personal gain.
Municipalities subcontract their service delivery mandate with no internal oversight or accountability mechanisms in place. It is no wonder that the state of local government is what it is. Cogta claims that a whopping 63% of municipalities are dysfunctional or almost dysfunctional.
l There are weak oversight and accountability mechanisms in local government;
l The deployment policy allows political parties great influence over the appointment of senior managers in municipalities leading to great instability especially in the buildup to an election;
l The political culture is cult-like, does not promote accountability or any display of a political will to put public interests above party and individual interests; and
l The citizenry (the public) is disengaged and lacks a vision for the South Africa it wants or a determination to demand accountability.
The public cannot afford to allow itself to be manipulated and for the conversation on state capture to be trivialised, politicised and sensationalised. It should mobilise to have this conversation outside the political party space. There is a need to critically reflect on, for example, the gaps in: our legislative framework; our institutional design; the political culture; the state of crime-fighting institutions and in turn, our ability to fight crime; the behaviour of business; and the capacity and role of citizens to demand accountability and to participate in oversight.
For as long as we are not doing this, state capture will continue irrespective of who or what party is in government and will still affect the poor at local government level the most.
Nontando Ngamlana is executive director of Afesis-corplan, an NGO based in East London working on local governance and sustainable settlement development. She writes in her personal capacity...