By Sandile Swana
The Zondo Commission has its origins in the complaints laid by Mmusi Maimane, the then leader of the DA and by the Roman Catholic Dominican Order based on publicly available information regarding state capture. The public protector received the complaints and determined that it was her duty in law to investigate state capture which was originally believed to be driven by the Zuma and Gupta families. It has since become clear that there are many families, multinational corporations and of course the ANC, itself involved in state capture.
The success of the Zondo Commission locally and internationally was that it exposed citizens of the world to the inner workings of state capture and concretised it in practice and as a scholarly concept worldwide. This means today if you do a web search on state capture, South Africa is intricately linked to the concept with much evidence given by ANC leaders, deployees, funders and state employees who were given illegal and corrupt instructions. This televised and documented spectacle by every type of media created enormous expectations from citizens locally and internationally, especially those concerned with good governance. The publicity was a good thing, the dirty linen is out there with a list of 300 names of wrongdoers for now.
The latest cabinet reshuffle is but one example that shows that the ANC and the ruling elites have no moral capacity to implement the full findings of the Zondo Commission. Mavuso Msimang, an ANC stalwart, said in a panel interview I shared with him that in reconstituting the new cabinet Ramaphosa had to get rid of all cabinet members who were implicated and listed in the Zondo report as compromised. Simply, anyone who had a whiff of corruption had to be fired. However, Zizi Kodwa, Gwede Mantashe and Pinky Kekana are among those who were retained in the cabinet regardless of appearing somewhere in the report as beneficiaries.
The Zondo Commission was never an ANC initiative but of the DA and the Catholics. The public protector and the courts compelled the ANC under Zuma and Ramaphosa to run the Zondo Commission as a judicial inquiry. But the ANC was identified as a culprit and beneficiary of state capture specifically. The ANC also published a letter where it made a general admission that it was the number one accused in corruption because evidence and its practices pointed in that direction.
At the centre of state capture is the truth that ANC has no credible and legitimate source of funding to finance its large pool of generally unemployed and unemployable cadres. It has a bloated staff and management structure that earns salaries comparable to the generally overpaid public sector employees.
Liquidating the state capture network of ANC operatives is unacceptable to the ANC. They are in it boots and all, starting with the state president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who, as chairman of the ANC deployment committee, personally made sure that the “correct” ANC person was placed at the exact position where they would open the taps for looting state resources. This also meant that those who were not aligned with looting of state resources for funding the ANC and the decadent lifestyles of ANC cadres, were removed from all critical positions. The ANC faced heavy financial problems as the Zuma aligned network was revamped to be more fitted to the CR faction. Advocate Paul Pretorius, the chief evidence leader at the Zondo commission, speaking recently at GIBS, University of Pretoria, said that after the Zondo Commission concluded its work it was fair to say that state capture continues, and the state is taking on a mafia character.
The ANC has 230 seats out of 400 in parliament and has the power to block recommendations of the Zondo Commission that seek to liquidate its state capture network which would be financial suicide. Many ANC heavyweights, related businesses, and foreign business interests have not yet setup credible alternative sources of revenue and therefore will, with impunity, block any effort to liquidate their source of income.
Along the same vein the NPA, SAPS, Hawks and many related agencies are totally underfunded and incapacitated.
• Swana is member of the 70s Group, is a political analyst and governance expert
