Corruption, State Capture, and sheer poor leadership pleasure by those that can make a difference to change the course that South Africa finds itself, is getting to pandemic proportions. This has indeed landed the governing party, the ANC, in fact, the entire governing and ruling elite, including a compromised judiciary, into an unenviable position. Whilst the country has institutional resources to deal a decisive blow to corruption and state capture, including the incarceration of perpetrators, it is facing the difficulty of achieving what society desires and is meaningful in this area without committing itself to the reality that the very leaders society expects to fight these ills will have to lead the orange overall march to prison.
Rhetoric that galvanises leadership of South Africa, business and political, to war against corruption and state capture only solves the problems in theory. Truth is that this battle is something the South African elite is fundamentally unprepared to tackle. To date leadership of South Africa has addressed this matter as belonging to a criminal justice system that is in itself not only compromised by the individuals operating inside it, but the institutionalised challenges in the laws that they must use to persecute the powerful in society. The predominance of private law firms, most of whom are in handsome retainer relationships with a coterie of monopolistic business and political elites, in legal drafting and pecking order determination of ascendance to the judiciary, has made the full out mobilisation of the criminal justice system difficult.
Consciously or otherwise, the governing political elite has for a while been scathing on the legitimacy of the criminal justice system to meddle into its affairs, in fact, there was a time taking its internal disputes to courts, in whom the judicial authority of the Republic vested, attracted automatic dismissal as a posture of the ANC. The result of this was the neglect of lawfare as a terrain within which most of its difficult policies could have been achieved without the need of the confusion of law making they embarked upon.
As the governing elite was discouraged from meddling in matters of the judiciary, given that there is still no dedicated policy discussion document on this power allocating aspect of state management, the politics of South Africa surrendered their responsibility to reconfiguring the philosophical basis of the 'law' that the 'rule of law' should be based on. This rendition puts it to the governing elite that it is the legality of how those hellbent on the truncating transformation of society, especially the reliance of its business leadership on corruption and the extent it has captured the state, which frustrates anti-corruption measures than the poor corruptees that are a means to the process.
The handling of corruption almost completely outside the discussion culture of the governing party's structures might be because such discussions will raise traditional in-governing party questions of what is corruption, what is not corruption, what are its attributes, who is corruptable, who is likely to corrupt, and what cultural practices propel or justify its perpetuating. In fact, subjected to the tools of analysis that were core in the optimisation strategy and tactics of the struggle system are applied, a in-governing party definition of corruption and state capture would by now be existing as an operating framework to deal with the two problems, at worst the the governing elite would have come with their attributes and because its members would have known what it is, it would have been neutralised within its ranks.
It is still mind boggling to fail to find in the state capture report a chapter dedicated of defining, describing, and explaining what is state capture and what is not state capture. The revelations that are now emerging in the United States of America, almost in the same way the Frankfurt findings about Steinhoff did, as well as the interesting involvement of the SANDF in Central African Republic would have benefited from such a definition if they were supposed to be in or out of now Chief Justice Zondo's purview. The animal and game related money laundering revelations that a seeping through our national discourse would have benefited from the criteria that was supposed to have preceded evidence leading at the commission, and all speculations about our billionaire South Africans participating in multi-million animal auctions would have been treated like just buying a Ferrari because you can.
The issue is, what are we dealing with here, without getting into who are we dealing with. CUT!!!
🤷🏿♂️Aredze...
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