The normative shifts in the ANC to deal with the scourge of corruption should be cautiously welcomed, given the salient resurgence of dictatorship by the new normative coalition within the very ANC. It has become increasingly easy for political elites with intents to recapture a state from an otherwise discredited political coalition or party to repurpose norms and standards associated with anti-corruption to promote socially acceptable government values to strengthen the sovereign authority of a personality cult. The mobilisation of the fourth estate as a bulwark to defend a ‘normatively shifting’ government thus milking out of corruption ‘newsworthy breaking stories’ of corruption enrols free media enthusiasts to a sub-context that elevates anti-corruption at the expense of social justice demands as manifest in institutionalised inequality and the economic gentrification of the voting majority of South Africa.
The political space afforded to anti-economic transformation based social justice reform activists that are funded to protect all substrates of the status quo, has emerged in this normative shift as the biggest beneficiary of a collapsing ideation centre inside the ANC. The growing support of national politics that advocate a social justice creation path that brackets economic transformation as a preserve of those that are proverbially ‘insiders’, has equated any reference to changing the template of economic domination with corruption and thieving. In fact the economy has now become a sovereign space that government would have to be permitted to have a say, if any.
The auctionability of civil society movement through their dependence of donor funding and the corporate social responsibility funds of the private sector have made this bodies to be political spokes entities of the financially dominant wheel. Compounding this is the advertising spend, a critical propeller of the media industry, concentrated in the hands of a few monopolistic businesses that control more than 70% of this spend. The politico-cultural majority status of those controlling advertising spend has now become a political voice that dominates the intervening period between voting dates. Cultural citizenship has in this context not only become feudal but shapes politics and discourse an social justice.
The role of voter becomes in this condition that of selecting from amongst themselves about 1400 politicians to national and provincial legislatures who would for the next five years be on auction to the highest bidder for one policy position or another, including ignorance of mandates given by the electorate. The sheer cost of purchasing this influence from these politicians as persons makes the return on investment for the economic status quo defending establishment to write off its value as a generational mission contribution.
As a result the concretising consensus between capital and state which is undoubtedly an asset to the stability of the South African democratic experiment, is increasingly getting under strain. Its anti-corruption basis which defines the new normative shift in government seems to be etched on a paradigm that elevates maintenance of the economic access status quo. Whilst grand corruption has somewhat liquidated the moral high ground of economic transformation based social justice, what has been paraded as evidence of corruption is increasingly manifesting lack of knowledge on how to register, manage and declare interests by those elected or appointed into public office than sheer thievery. The incorrectness of what some of the accused have supposedly done can be found to have been correct if due process of declaration as provided for in law was followed.
At the core of the growing discontent that the law is applied differently to individuals, is the sophistication of one individual from another. Upon assuming political office, President Ramaphosa ring-fenced his interests into trust that are managed by trustees he has appointed. In doing so, he has not relinquished ownership of his interests but created a fiduciary regime that ‘exonerates’ him from the decisions made on behalf of his companies. Those he has entrusted to manage his personal interests continue to be his personal network whose reach to state actors can only be limited by their integrity as persons. This arrangement is an acceptable global practice whose only insurance is the integrity of actors.
The model was also effectively utilised to create a trust whose purpose was to house all donations towards his election as ANC President and arguably the nation’s number 1 citizen. The accountability to accept or otherwise of donations lay with the trustees who would be governed by provisions of laws regulating trusts. The illegality or otherwise of the funding of his campaign will be tested against the purposes of the trust as registered. Those purposes might have an impact on the ANC but have nothing to do with its internal processes. In fact the freedoms that our constitution guarantees would make it difficult to find fault in the correctness of the establishment of the trust if the President is not its founder. What might be at risk, and will largely be a perception-cum-reputation risk, is the divulging of those that donated or received funds from the trust; still the trust deed might be the arbiter.
The normative shift includes therefore how political incumbents play in the new order of doing politics. The liberation movement rhetoric to alter the templates of dominance would thus require a reconciliation of tactics with the requirements of a formal political party whose new currency might be the balancing of interests of the differently defined dominant in society. What might be secured into posterity in the new order are the political, human and civil right as limited by the constitution; the rest will be a continuously negotiated space whose circumvention might be a matter of affording the skyrocketing legal fees gatekeeping access to justice. The attainment of a economic transformation based social justice system has unfortunately been wrestled out of majoritarian power and firmly anchored into the ‘how constitutional is it’ domain of our democratic system.
Whilst this is the new reality, those basking in the sun of the new and dawning order should do so realising that ‘it would be naive to think that the truncated liberation promises to the electorate can be frozen by this new Neo-conservative political space’, occasioned by the ‘normative shift’ of the governing elite. There are already bubbling tensions which are inherently historical that would require expensive trade offs to close the trust deficit between the ‘economic establishment’ and those that are ‘economic access gentrified’. Given the already displayed arrogance of some in the economic establishment, it might be difficult to reverse the trends in the evolution of this arrogance into some hegemonic victory over the state by capital. This might require a non-state led conversation to shape the new and dawning order so as to protect the founding values of our nation by amongst others;
- devising a plan that has social justice as its outcome
- defining incremental outputs into that outcome
- identifying templates of economic domination that require fracturing without vitiating the importance of competition
- opening up the media space to allow for a diversity of views, including what we don’t like to hear
- establishing specialist commissions of inquiry to shape what should go into public policy
- off the cuff commissions that should be non- negotiable are
- Education for global competitiveness
- Defining a development state path
- Industrialisation of South Africa and the region
In implementing the above we will restore what President Mbeki referred to on the occasion of the adoption of our country's constitution the "this thing that we have done today, in this small corner of a great continent that has contributed so decisively to the evolution of humanity says that Africa reaffirms that she is continuing her rise from the ashes".
Ngisho nje
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