When dealing with non-state, or non-governmental corruption, including state capture, the South African academic media complex, its analyst community, and policymakers are typically employing a vocabulary or posture of non-engagement or outright silence. On the contrary when there are similar, or less impactful to the economy corruption stories, involving state functionaries, mainly black, and acutely Bantu-Blacks, a vocabulary and nomenclature of conflict-catastrophe-apocalypse is employed. These contradictions, if they are not a deliberate blight on the race-inspired hegemony theatre propelled by a monopolized media culture power, are foregrounding the control of national narratives as new battlefields where the war for the soul of South Africa would be won or lost.
The corruption and state capture armageddon presentation of South Africa to the world, especially where it involves its governing class or elite, is already eating at whatever is left of investor confidence and the ability of normative democracies and their business community to trust doing business in and with South Africans. Is it not high time that South Africans should understand that the control and acceptance of narratives about us is a new domain of conflict and thus a key terrain we needed to have long taken and/or defended?
The fifteen years since the courageous decision by President Thabo Mbeki to release his Deputy, Jacob Zuma, from office, have started an anti-corruption narrative in South Africa that revealed how hugely consequential can integrity management systems have on the political stability of a democracy. It has also shown how the ignorance, and/or airbrushing of private sector corruption from the national narrative can work to propel movements that will target state institutions in the criminal justice system for capture so that the inevitability of incarceration is permanently neutralized through the appointment of accounting authorities responsible thereto. As the threat to the stability of democracy was becoming a reality and growing, expectations that the state as an institution would be able to mitigate the risks were woefully waning concomitant with the rise of ‘gangster’ politicking and ‘mafia-style’ monopoly business practices that controlled the narrative through the large advertising budgets they controlled.
What the imbalance of forces in the control of the narrative struggle has achieved is to correctly diagnose the threat of going the path of a failed state, notwithstanding it focussing only on public sector corruption, and mainly where grand corruption was minuscule compared to revelations that are raining from the international corruption narrative about South African companies and individuals. It is the unencumbered nature of investigators operating with criminal justice systems that have no eyes for how the corrupt are profiled in a narrative that landed on our shores revelations of multi-billion-dollar corruption. Interestingly this involved those that our governing elite dine and interact with, including parading them as angels with which local corruption can be neutralized.
It cannot be true, and acceptable, that a scandal of proportions at the level of what private sector companies cited in more than one commission of inquiry into the variants and locations of corruption failed to pick up an iota of what other anti-corruption agencies out of our elite network complexes could unearth. It is the capabilities that these in-mega-money corrupt corporates and the ineffective to silent responses, and almost bordering on protecting these corrupt companies against the ‘efficient to others’ anti-corruption mechanisms/systems that undermine the trust in the governing elite’s commitment to ridding South Africa of the scourge of corruption. The leadership of these companies, which is composed of individuals whose paraded normative credentials, that have at some point drew upon the social capital they had to condemn others to the dustbin of the corrupt, has put the question of how at stake society’s trust in corporate sector leadership is.
It is already a given that trust in the public sector, as we saw in how the private sector claimed the space as angels that can manage the KZN disaster better than the government, is eroded. There was a growing fresh air that the convergence of private sector ethical standing and whatever is still left in the public sector will start a movement where every dime is accounted for in respect of how legitimate is the cost it was spent on. The need therefore to seriously consider a reconstruction and development program of the morality of how we do business as a country is established. South African businesses and governments should work at developing a national moral resilience by interrogating the links between the non-racial character of ethicality and the expectations of our national criminal justice system to resist the abusive power of the cognitive legal and prosecution elite. The key to this intervention over the medium to long term should not be about the eradication of elite-managed corruption but about making the criminal justice system survive its sophistication and capability to abuse the benevolence society naturally gives to out-of-state-apparatuses elites.
With South Africa’s trust in its government, institutions, and more dangerously fellow citizens, society cannot afford to further include in the list the private sector that has so well managed to manufacture consent that it is ethical. As President Ramaphosa is painstakingly working on the strengthening of the moral foundations of society, and notwithstanding his personal links with some of the in-conflict with the law at other democracies companies, we should know that the criminality that corruption is, preys on (1) weaknesses in the moral standing of those that fight it, (2) sowing distrust of information about corruption, and (3) ballooning misinformation that exacerbates hatred within humans inside institutions of leadership such as is experienced in almost all political parties of South Africa and organized business organizations. It is this ‘dystopian future which South Africa’s leadership that is still clean, of what is gradually being revealed as the depth of national corruption, should worry about, and in fact fast track the social compact summit, and start reviewing this ‘they are more corrupt than us’ culture that is developing. The politics of our country are gradually concretising in offerings of leaders that compete on who is less corrupt. The capacity of voters to have the conscience guide their voting is being affected by the normalisation of corrupt leaders, since many that are followed by allegations of corruption, and some charged, are faces of dominant political parties, and this is across the board.
The revelations of malfeasance within corporate South Africa, albeit ignored by commissions of inquiry even if evidence was publicly led, shows that corruption and state capture are non-racial crimes. The corrupters and capturers can only be those that have the millions or means to do so. It begs to question if the acceptance of guilt and preparedness to pay fines in the US by Glencore is at that quantum, what is the quantum related to our energy security woes as an economy? It should be the basis, sometimes bordering on chauvinistic profiling of those that are corrupt, in reporting which requires attention too. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️A ni dyi xa munu, ndzo tsala
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