The funders shall govern: Is in-ANC candidate funding a new site of state capture?

 "One of the pressing challenges of the South African political context, both as a science and lived experience, as well as a theory developing space, is the historical traditions of the ANC, which have defined its story as a continuum of defining and redefining its character and purpose objectives. Whilst many scholars have written about the ANC, the default posture has mostly been narrating its history and not its traditions as a core substrate of its character. Its rich history and traditions have made it a heritage site or space. Its overall contribution to liberalism in Africa and convergence of ideologies in the ongoing construction of democraticness in the continent remains an unrecorded opportunity". "For a while, there have been strange behaviours that could easily be characterised as the subversion of the ANC's traditions and by extension its heritage as Africa's foremost institution that lives consultation and policy engagement with its members". In Mamdani's parlance, "South Africa remains a (political) genocide that did not happen, as well as seeing through the many protests that could easily be classified as civil strife despite the absence of an active war".

Notwithstanding that a political genocide has indeed not happened, the unfolding and self-inflicted ideological genocide, disguised as leadership contestations which address nothing towards the advancement of declared attributes of a developmental state, unwritten attributes of a national democratic society being pursued, and optimisation aspects of the national democratic revolution, inside the ANC party activities about conferences are becoming a slow poison killing either the organisation or its character. Through control of the ANC, any plot to capture the government as an active agent of the state is a job half done. 

This rendition examines how ANC elective conferences have become a primary site of state capture over the years before the actual capture beyond the party itself. Some questions to be answered or asked include, 'Does unregulated inside-the-party funding, as a form of corruption and state capture, grease the wheels of grand corruption, or throw sand into the gears of good government envisaged by the 1996 Constitution'. If left unregulated, conference delegate buying or incentivising can block ethical leaders' ascendance because it stifles unencumbered sovereign individual excellence and innovation. Large amounts of cash circulating during ANC elective conferences can only indicate the birthing of a criminal or mafia political system and the dearth of normative politics. 

 

Conference outcomes are more and more informed if not determined by cash inputs made by funders of candidates vying for strategic political offices in the party. The institutionalisation of specific names as permanent features in the National Executive Committee has traces in the presence of money at instructing sub-national conferences to the National Conference. This matter has also grown a political economy of its own and has assumed a character of defining the ANC as not only a lobbyist Mecca every five years but a money laundering site with influence on Africa's most important geopolitical democracy as the prize of this variant of politicking. 

 

Corruption through a party or candidate capture is one of the oldest partners in and of good politics. The Political parties, and more acutely governing ones, have become sitting ducks for the shoot by money, influential individuals, interests, and institutions for influence. Despite legislative frameworks and global norms aimed at dealing with corruption and adjuncts, this cost of power has become one of financial and management accounting's ever-changing book entries to comply with generally accepted accounting principles. Corporate governance manuals have reflected on this aspect with an emerging consensus to regulate the extent of abuse without restricting the use of such facilities. In recent times, gaining creatively defined advantages with those in power through 'feathering nets', kickbacks, pay-to-get-in, politician grooming and outright purchase, and capturing centres of constitutionally defined authority have been a common thing but a normalised practice of doing politics. 

 

The sophisticated settling-in of such practices as part of a normalised way of gaining political control of centres of power is one of the threats to the rule of law and the quest to protect fair play in the conduct of business with the public sector and public service. This practice's continued success in raising leaders encumbered by those who funded them has elevated money laundering and corruption as strategic leverage in determining a society's destiny. In recent conferences of the ANC, at all levels, including its leagues, and evidence is emerging that this is also in most membership-dependent leadership selection organisations, the practice of purchasing influence is rife in South Africa. The sealing or restrictions through the courts of information about who funded the CR17 project within the ANC has made the 2017 ANC Elective Conference in its entirety join everyone in the dock for corruption as a numbered and accused juristic person. 

 

Over and above legitimation directly attached to merit, the insurance to be recognised and allowed into the innermost circle of the liberation movement, purchasing your way into the centre can be a distinguishing factor for anyone to gain access. This facility's mere availability has attracted the governing party's leadership circles to interesting and somewhat 'strange breeds of leaders. That this variant of corruption has continued unabated and, in some instances, celebrated and curated into posterity does not make it a correct practice. The hegemony of patronage has been replacing the ideological hegemony that defined the party's purpose of existence for a while. It has to be acknowledged that patronage farming and harvesting has been with party politics wherever such existed, but not at the bluntness and scale we are either observing or adapting to. 

 

A school of thought endorsed this practice as a strategic intervention to 'save the country from the continuation of some of the revelations in the Zondo Commission and related'. Quizzed about their involvement in this process, despite knowing it is wrong, captains of the industry argue that the ANC capture is now a managed risk to democracy. They are discussing who should capture it and no longer whether or not it should be captured; by implication, the state too. This has normalised the practice as leadership change at the 54th Conference owes its success to it. As a model of success, the ANC has formalised it by requiring candidates to declare sources and quantum of money injected. This requirement is outside the normatively determined limits to political party funding, which is enacted. 

 

The consequence of this has been doctrinal shifts that are more transactional than being based on substantive matters undergirding what defined the liberation movement in the first place. In the ANC, umrabulo ruled the day, and to be in good standing included understanding what ANCness is all about. Command and defence of what the ANC stood for defined how you would ultimately be deployed onto a responsibility to coordinate a collective for the sake of leading society. The content of your contribution defined the extent and sphere of your influence. The ultimate bar all had to live up to was the pursuit of national interests to the extent that they helped create a National Democratic Society. The 110-year-old struggle system the ANC has led and optimised at every historical epoch has always relied on the generous contributions of members and its destiny helpers.  As a result, those with money have made the ANC become a strategic tool that will impact the transformation of society’s objectives of the ANC. However, others use it as leverage to thwart or gain specific policy outcomes because they have paid. 

 

The openness and democratic heritage of the ANC has opened it up to be easily weaponised against its stated objectives. Its main strength of broader consultation with branches has made it vulnerable to conditions where if those branches are purchased, its policy or leadership selection outcomes will reflect the intents of the highest bidder. Giving delegates the discretion to bargain their votes at conferences has put a premium on delegates as determinants of South Africa's political leadership for as long as the ANC is the governing party. This political risk is present in the opposition parties’ spaces, save at varying levels of sophistication. 

 

The famous tagline of the 1955 Freedom Charter, the people shall govern,' has mutated into 'The funders shall govern'. Arguably, the preamble of both the Freedom Charter and the 1996 Constitution, which is core to the basis upon which South Africa as a democracy was birthed, are de facto being amended by these unbridled money-etched politics. The current state of affairs could easily make the Freedom Charter preamble read, "We, the Funders of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know ... that South Africa NOW belongs to all who FUND it, black and white (or otherwise including non-South Africans and where feasible the underworld) and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of POLITICAL PARTY FUNDERS". It could well further read, "...that our country will never be prosperous or free unless all FUNDERS live in brotherhood, enjoying special equal rights and opportunities to the economy, ...and that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the FUNDERS, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief". 

 

Because the use of money benefits the broader leadership election ecosystem, the fight against it has yet to receive attention as a form of corruption and state capture. Save for what is indirectly provided for in the party funding legislation, the within-political party candidate funding has not received law enforcement attention. As a substrate of ascension to political power, the capture of the within-political party campaign process is the cradle of corruption and state capture is experienced where accountability at a public power level is exercised. Influence over the broader politics of society and, by extension, policy choices winning political parties will take is now a function of the extent to which bought influence of individuals to enter the ANC has been weaponised against the genuine transformation of society. What needs to be engaged is how much money at political party conferences is leveraged to extort favourable policy options. Can this practice qualify as corruption and a form of state capture?

 

The battle for strategic sites in the renewal and rebuilding terrain between inside-the-ANC oligarchs and the leader of the society brigade has begun. While the leader of the society brigade is wrestling for the hegemonic survival of the ANC as an undisputed leader of society based on the moral force of its content, the encroaching oligarchic cohort is purchasing its position with risks of making the ANC a toy telephone of funders. The political power distortions of post-liberation governing elites establishing a dependency on state resources as an economy have created conditions where perverted individuals establish a graft-sustaining political economy so repressive that only they and their allies can thrive. 

 

In this unregulated inside-the-party funding system, custodians of the Freedom Charter, for as long as it has existed, the ANC, are allowing 'breeds of its membership' to repurpose and amend it. Unfortunately, South Africa is now becoming a world wherein "every FUNDED man and woman shall have the right to vote for and to stand as a candidate for all bodies which make laws and ...all FUNDED people shall be entitled to take part in the government of the country. 

 

While the democratisation of South Africa is protected by its Constitution, how powerful individuals access it for personal aggrandisement can be a form of dictatorship. Oligarchs, in all variants, have the strategic acumen to exploit any inherent weaknesses of the democratic system, and candidate funding to lead the governing party is one such weakness. The internal coherence of the ANC through its 'power-is-at-the-branches' doctrine has been neatly disrupted to undermine its original intentions. As Tom Burgis wisens, "the more the state crumbles, the greater the need for each individual to make ends meet. However they can; the greater the looting, the more the authority of the state withers". In this instance, the looting of individuals as candidates for leadership is at stake. 

 

After the 1994 democratic breakthrough, efforts at integrating and expanding the benefits of the liberation promise and the limits of the ANC-as-governing-party ability to make its members more stable and prosperous have become evident, revealing deep divisions within the liberation movement over fundamental values. How the new oligarchs within the governing ANC exert their influence on the state started to represent an extension of strange governing model breeds, which operate on state-sponsored corruption…and have now penetrated most aspects of society, including the highest levels of government. This form of eroding inside-the-ANC democratic tradition is a form of corruption.

 

The natural outcome of a 'rented leadership' by those who paid for its ascendance is that the corruption that goes with the context infects the authority of all active agencies of the state, acutely government, thus entrenching itself and spreading into extensive patronage systems.  A dual state, where prerogatives of funders exist side by side with the normative demands of the Constitution. Instead of governors, we will have rulers, who often maintain personal armies outside what the state provides. The next stop for this allowed governing party leadership capture might be a condition whereby "to retain power, elected officials to rig elections, bribe elections agencies, intimidate voters, cut off authorised funding for opposition parties, control the media, disregard term limits, and co-opt or threaten opposition candidates". 

In its strictest definition, "corruption is dishonest behaviour by those in positions of power. It can come in the form of bribery, double-dealing, and defrauding those with a vested stake and interest in the endeavour". Sadly, the consequences of corruption can be multidimensional and more acutely socio-economic and development choking, but with a significant impact on those who are materially vulnerable. "Corruption occurs when someone in a position of power uses their authority to influence decisions or conducts any other dishonest or fraudulent behaviour like giving or accepting bribes or inappropriate gifts, double-dealing, under-the-table transactions, manipulating elections, diverting funds, laundering money, and defrauding those with vested interests such as members of an organisation or investors". Inside-party-leadership contest funding, in its current unregulated form, is a form of corruption and state capture. CUT!!!