In the wake of corruption assuming a pandemic growth, contemplating a crisis, fragile, or failed -state environment is now real. Scholars, public policy practitioners, civil society bodies, and the country's leadership in general have reached a consensus that after racism and apartheid, corruption is the new crime against human development. The brittle leadership decisiveness, either because it is compromised or in a context of sheer incapability, procure for strategic policy shifts or interventions to fight the scourge.
In a democratic dispensation like South Africa, corruption is seen as a breeding ground of conduct that is at variance with the founding values defining the South Africa we all want. The brazen state of looting and patronage creates a trust deficit between the investor community on the one hand and the state on the other.
The several incidents ventilated at the various commissions of enquiry stand as evidence of a country that was under a siege of corruption. Manufactured or true, the nine years that President Zuma was the head of state, including his yet to be finalised 'arms procurement case' that runs from a Mandela Presidential term, stand out as the epicentre of the anti-corruption movement in South Africa.
The proximity of business people to those with political power, albeit not a bad practice in matured democracies, has in South Africa, and potentially because of its radical transformation dimensions, been characterised as state capture.
Specific to the state capture narrative was the depth of influence the Gupta family and several other families and businesses had over strategic executive authority decisions of the Republic. That perceived sort of unchecked influence on the executive authority or head of state aroused the indignant spirit of the South African civil society movement and ultimately sparked the birth of a anti-corruption movement few post-liberation governments have seen before.
With the democratic order that came with unrestrained concentration of freedoms and power in hands of society, the mobilisation prowess of civil society movements on anything is always exponential in South Africa. In the eyes of power the once widely admired and regarded as a tonic of freedom and democracy civil society movement became a new frontier to organise the anti-corruption brigade with a diffused leadership.
In the mix of the anti-corruption brigade, legitimate in its own right, was the justification on the one hand by a skewed interpretation or 'bellpottingerisation' of radical economic transformation, and a sophisticated capitalisation of the corruption context to reduce an otherwise difficult to dislodge political power grip of the governing party.
With the support of big business to a post-1994 republicanism anchored on resistance to unaccountable public power, the domineering character of the influence around the executive authorities, state capture if you like, became a threat to the liberal order South African capital was threading.
The influence of capital, which undergirded the dimension of republicanism espoused in the post-1994 constitutional order started to resourcefully chafe at this unchecked power to be corrupt and corruptible with state money. To capital, in its non-racial character, democracy is there to strictly serve a financial prosperity path. The republicanism in the constitutional order which views citizens as participants in a democratic order could only be the required ingredient to facilitate the proliferation of the anti-corruption brigade with all its specialisms. The template of being democratic which South Africa adopted could have easily become a facilitator of corruption in as much as it became its enemy, had it not been the founding values the Mandela leadership cohort entrenched in the Constitution.
The moral appeal of anti-corruption went deeper to interrogate the membership integrity management systems of political parties. It also grew to being an opportunity to mount internal-to-party leadership succession campaigns as leadership contenders started to use party platforms as primaries through which they communicated with society their anti-corruption and state capture postures. A new platform through which a consensus against corruption was thus birthed. The neutrality of capital in politics was sucked into in-party leadership contestation in defence of capital's interest to stop the slide towards the ultimate, a failed state.
The prospect of a Ramaphosa Presidency with its pro-business branding became the ultimate catalyst to mainstream anti-corruption in the highest office of the land. In his speeches towards the 2017 Conference of the ANC, Ramaphosa was wise to draw from the significant threat of corruption to the democratic order and its contribution to the reputation fragility of the ANC. As capital invested in his campaign to be President to create in him a pivot to liquidate the corruption concentrate in the national executive, the in-ANC political machinery saw him as an opportunity to consolidate generational change in the leadership of the ANC.
As it were, the Ramaphosa Presidency started with a ticket of anti-corruption. He had the Nugent, Mampati, Mokgoro, and in-process Zondo Commission reports as a roadmap to navigate the consequence management landmines with potential career limiting prospects. Compounding this were reports from Chapter 9 institutions on the state of the democratic order and how healthy or otherwise its administration is. As a pivot around which consent on the disorder that corruption can bring to South Africa is to be manufactured, Ramaphosa had the historical mandate to save democracy and freedom from those weaponised by greed, crass, and self-aggrandisement against the democratic order.
The Ramaphosa-as-pivot anti-corruption brigade birthed by the historical moment had a mandate to, (a) make the democratic order's survival of corruption and state capture it goal, (b) demand accountability and restrain those with public power and thus reduce, if not, truncate their prerogative power, (c) properly enforce rules and norms that corruption and state capture have been rendering more and more obsolete, and (d) restore the power of citizens to be part of the regulatory architecture limiting the prerogative power of those in the state.
Internal to his political party, arguably the nexus of political life in South Africa, Ramaphosa had the mandate to (a)renew the ANC, (b) make its membership integrity management systems work and have consequence, (c) overhaul its leadership selection processes to filter the encroaching strange breeds of leadership that have been poisonous to its leader of society standing, and (d) recreating the ANC as an institution of leader of society leadership.
That Ramaphosa as President of the ANC and country is a pivot, vortex, and whirlpool of the national anti-corruption effort is no longer contested. As a human institution he is a convergence point where society would mirror its progress against the scourge Nelson Mandela spoke to when he handed over the baton to Thabo Mbeki and all that followed up to Ramaphosa. To him this assumed a personal character as his ascension to office sought to separate him from the organisation that commissioned him to lead it.
Deep into his term of office disturbing revelations of activities at the private farm of President Ramaphosa are posing a risk to him as a pivot in the two offices he holds. These revelations are interrogating similar, and for a while tangential, news all of which he was 'absolved' on the strength of the integrity capital he came with into the office. Without making Ramaphosa a saint in a world where they are scarce, the integrity capital South Africans are expecting a return of in him being their President can never make him or his party survive if he treats it in promissory terms. Notwithstanding the narrative of dealing with Ramaphosa matters as personal and not of a public power nature, the brute truth is that integrity must suffuse everything he does. This is because the consequences of deceit are usually greater than the ones of truth. These revelations have started to disintegrate the anti-corruption narrative he started. Him being the pivot is now shaky and the centre he is or was is no longer holding.
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