The Zondo commission may, some time in the future, be remembered as the truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) of our time. As an inquiry into political, economic, institutional and cognitive capture, the commission may have to go further than the TRC. It is something SA owes itself.
There was an implicit promise that democratic SA would become progressively a more equal country, with a government that was more ethical than the ancien régime and more dedicated to rolling back injustices, and would build on whatever financial and economic gains the country had made over decades and spread those gains more equitably across society.
It is fashionable, as part of the performance radicalism that besets the country, to blame the Treasury for the country’s failures. This is factually incorrect, and simply part of racialist, ideological and populist rhetoric, with little grounding in evidence.
The evidence actually shows that the Treasury did, for most of the democratic era, spend very large amounts of money on social policies such as social grants, education and, as it goes, on land reform.
If we think of the state as a well-functioning, high-performance engine, and of the Treasury as a carburettor, once fuel (money) is fed into the engine, other parts of the state need to do what they are designed to do. The Treasury cannot be a gearbox, a constant velocity joint, or a piston.
Since 2009 the post-apartheid government has failed, quite horribly. The political economy – the systems of exchange and transfer, of equity in manufacturing, production, industry, commerce, consumption, distribution and finance and land reform – is hanging by two or three threads.
The Treasury, Reserve Bank and the SA Revenue Service, which has for now been rescued from the class of 2009, seem to be what is holding the political economy together.
If the Zondo inquiry into allegations of state capture, corruption and fraud in the public sector was to go further than the TRC, there would have to be prosecutions, incarceration and, as much as is possible, reclamation of some of the money that was syphoned from the state.
This would, in the least, restore confidence in the state and the country’s political economy.
A strong case is to be made for expanding the commission’s terms of reference. This is not inconceivable – the second clause of the Government Gazette of January 25 2018, which established the commission, provides for addition, variation and amendment “from time to time”.
The argument would be for a greater inquiry into maladministration, and given the expressed urgency of land expropriation with or without compensation, the commission may want to look at misallocation of funds and fruitless expenditure in the ministry and department responsible for land affairs since at least 1999.
There is every possibility that the government will adopt a policy of expropriation without compensation. Before that is done, the state organs responsible for land should be cleaned up.
Parenthetically, there is a matter ex ante that requires attention. The current rural development and land reform minister, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, presided over the precipitous decline of SA’s moral authority abroad during the administration of Jacob Zuma.
As the former international relations and co-operation minister, Nkoana-Mashabane has serious questions to answer about expenditure for herself and an often oversized retinue between 2009 and 2018.
There is also any number of diplomatic issues.
Two examples stand out: the ease with which Grace Mugabe slipped out of the country, and the ease with which the Gupta aircraft slipped into the country.
What investigative journalists may want to look at is the vast amount of money the Treasury allocated to land affairs from 1996 to 2018, establish where it all went, and what was achieved. In a very brief Saturday night read, official documents (the 2000 land affairs expenditure survey) showed an increase in spending on personnel by an estimated 55%, from R113.4m in 1996-97 to R176.6m in 1999-2000.
Much of this spending was on consultants and “a restitution process” that shifted from policy planning to the “more personnel intensive implementation phase”. What, exactly, was implemented? How much, exactly, was spent on consultants? Who were these consultants?
It would be unwise to second-guess the work of the Zondo commission. We would, however, miss a great opportunity to examine the detritus of maladministration, the misallocation of funds and the wanton issuing of contracts to consultants, and for the public to weigh that up against land reform that has actually been implemented since 1994.
Lagardien is a former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University and has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
-- This piece first appeared in Business Day..