President Ramaphosa will undoubtedly go into history of South Africa as a leader that stood firm against the scourge of corruption. Elected with a mandate to rebuild and unite the ANC after its punishingly divisive 54 National Elective Conference, he chose to rebuild and unite the ANC upon what has arguably been its most divisive subject, Corruption. Armed with an understanding of the investment community’s interest in a government, he angled on driving an anti-corruption program that would be undergirded by consequence management as its towering feature.
Surrounded by an elected National Executive Committee that has amongst its members leaders who are themselves the subject and/or object of the corrupt political leadership narrative, his drive pitted him against, his friends, comrades and adversaries mutated into a force to contend with, and for his vision of a less corrupt society. what should have supposedly been his immediate policy comfort zone, the NEC, became a contestation theatre whose implications is still to be computed on the extent to which it reversed the 1994 democratic breakthrough gains in economic transformation terms.
His was to establish a governing order that would restore the confidence of society not only in government as an agency of the State, but his ANC as the central motive force to advance the nation building project anchored on a prosperity for all economic development paradigm. In this endeavour he inherited a context wherein his office, and not his person, was identified, rightly or wrongly, as the epicentre of the corruption, including its adjunk State Capture, engulfing the country. The context was not only a perception but a defined problem whose resolution was assigned to a judicial commission of inquiry. The same context included evidence of state institutions in the criminal justice system having been repurposed away from corruption by elected state officials wielding executive authority power at various sphere and tiers of government.
In his arsenal President Ramaphosa had ANC resolutions that would have made his destined conflict with friends and foes within the ANC legal, in the context of the ANC’s own way of doing things. It should be mentioned that the ANC has an established decorum within which its leaders are mainly judged on how they pursued its policies, notably National Conference Resolutions,most of which connect its struggle system, aptly termed a National Democratic Struggle towards the formation of a National Democratic Society. It is this decorum of ANCness that should have made the Ramaphosa anti-corruption drive a no brainer because of its endorsement by successive conference resolutions since the ANC became a national governing party. The most consequential of its resolutions, occasioned by an almost chronic appearance of former President Zuma in criminal court cases, is the step aside provisions that may be recommended by the ANC’s own integrity commission.
As a policy instrument the ANC’s own integrity commission was construed within a context that sought to wrestle the power to sanction it own leaders and members out of the court of public opinion. This wrestling included claiming this power out of organs of state that may have had a material interest in its leadership contestation matters. The integrity commission as a construct would have positioned its recommendations outside the inside-NEC palace wars and provide a process with which ANC members understood stepping aside as not being stepping down and yet affording members an opportunity to resolve their standing with the law, as well as the demands of a rule of law constitutional dispensation.
Whilst this policy creativity assured members their ‘innocent until proven guilty’ human right status, it’s practical application equally creates a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ context in that its consequences are acutely individual in so far as ‘stepping aside’ is. The expectation that ‘career’ politicians would subject their livelihood to a step aside policy whose basis maybe a result of erroneous charges being laid against them, brought to the fore the extent to which the recombined impact of this policy and ‘innocent until proven guilty’ one can co-exist. The politics milieu made the co-existence a fascinatingly political explosive matter. Like any policy instrument, the individuality of the consequences would be louder commensurate with the position the individual occupies inside the ANC. Policy theory shows that policies will always assume a leadership core that will live up to the demands of the policies it makes, in fact it is the habitual activities of leadership that shapes a value system requisite for the policies they make to work, or otherwise.
President Ramaphosa was elected into an ANC whose electoral performance woes were in an increase not only because of service delivery challenges, but also the perceived conduct of its leadership as chronicled in reports by the Public Protector and the independent media. His in-ANC ‘campaign’ was creatively aligned to the anti-corruption demands of society that has at that time classified anyone opposed to his ANC Presidency a candidate in support of the discredited status quo. With revelations of a possible captured state by those in close proximity to the then President and members of his Cabinet, that ironically included Ramaphosa, his campaign had to be decisively a break with perceived stealth one. In this endeavour the entire in-ANC campaign for President by Ramaphosa broke with most traditions of ANC leadership contests. It utilised primaries-US-style rallies disguised as public lectures at non-ANC platforms to openly campaign. These campaigns were simultaneously in communication with the broader electorate of the country, thus entrenching the Ramaphosa anti-corruption drive as a substrate of an emerging social compact his ANC leadership will be entering into with society.
The preponderance of ANC leaders associated with a captured pre-2019 state in the post NASREC ANC NEC, as well as the close call win of Ramaphosa meant the new would have had to co-exist wit the ‘unwanted’ old. Whist the NEC was poised for a change in approach to corruption, its composition meant some amongst its members had to partake in deciding on their fate should it be established they were in the ‘captured state’ vortex. Organs of State charged with the responsibility to follow through on reported and revealed ‘captured state’ transgressions would be caught in the anti-corruption war crossfire and thus re-accusable of being used to settle political scores. Compounding this aspect is the crafty manner in which monopoly capital has been able to enforce a link between a ‘captured state’ and the noble intents of the transformation platform used by some of those that could be successfully linked in social or otherwise terms with ‘capturers of the state’. Arguably those within the Ramaphosa NEC that still advocated for the economic transformation program to be radicalised would gradually find themselves as being in a camp craftily defined as ‘capturers of the state’. Evidence of those charged in the vortex of getting rid of ‘capturers of the state’ made leading figures vocal for a radicalised economic transformation approach to become dangerous ambassadors of an otherwise noble program of transformation.
Without being aware, or intentional, monopoly capital’s demand for consequence management on ANC leaders found in, suspected, reported and charged for any malfeasance has started a civil society pressure whose intents of anti-corruption have been pegged as intents to reverse the radical economic transformation policies of the ANC. This has created an unfortunate binary of anti-corruption versus economic transformation. In this binary President Ramaphosa and Ace Magashule have been craftily became the faces of these mutually inclusive programs, despite a highly funded enterprise to make the mutually exclusive. The kowtowing of ANC NEC members into submission to this dictate by monopoly capital that RET is a euphemism for ‘capturing the state’, and especially in a context of lessened political activities occasioned by the corona virus pandemic, COVID19, has muted noises that would have naturally rescued the RET policy to stand its moral ground.
The political lull that came with COVID19 and a near rule by decree political space accorded to President Ramaphosa has successfully made South African politics to dislodge from their mass based character and gradually becoming an elite construct. Access to politics is through secondary mediums unless you can afford the data and gadgets within which real politics occur. The ‘family meeting’ construct of interacting with society has made national television stations pulpits through which society interacts with its politics with less or restricted access to feedback, save compliance or otherwise. This state of affairs has developed into a Ramaphosaism whose noble anti-corruption intents find themselves on a crossfire of demands for a radicalised economic transformation and a stable political order.
The revelations of malfeasance, true or otherwise, by those closer to a Ramaphosa anti-corruption drive, including his alleged involvement in some of the as Matshela Koko and Brian Molefe, allege have created new contexts upon which the anti-corruption drive would either be believed or rejected. This context has emboldened those opposed to anti-corruption to claim the opening credibility space by bastardising Radical Economic Transformation. In this battle the President, whilst in control, emerges as a conduit of what the ‘anti-corruption’ version of monopoly capital wants more than what ANC anti-corruption is all about. The quest to find a ‘big fish’ in the ‘capturers of the state’ pond, in a almost ‘COVID19 rule by decree State’ context has bred a culture where guaranteed constitutional rights are on auction for the prize of investor confidence. Judges are giving judgements whose long term implications will be costly to reverse in respect of the base social compact and accord South Africa has codified into a Constitution. This missteps have emboldened opposition to anti-corruption as a wedge driver between what should accrue as dividends of citizenship and Black Africans.
AND THE FINGERS GOT TIRED.
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