The renewal might well be working

Published in the Sunday Times 09 April 2024

The saga around the ultimate charging of South Africa's chief lawmaker might indicate that the governing party is not only shedding its old skin and staying the same but metamorphosing into a creature we are poised to encounter beyond May 29, 2024. Notwithstanding that her surrender was preceded by a dramatic display of a truism that 'politicians can’t be expected to act contrary to their well-being', the speaker was indeed sensitive to the disrepute her quest to be innocent was or would be bringing to the office she held. 

 

She now stands in the dock with many in our land, as accused number one, as the President once opined. It is true that, by law, she is presumed innocent until proven guilty, a right she shares with all South Africans. However, we don't share with her the depth of reputational damage her arrest did to society's trust in our democratic order, which her indictment of the NPA characterises as a right. Many in the vocation of politics in South Africa have been enjoying this right without consequence. In the build-up to her arrest, we saw only state institutions intervening because the conscience of the Speaker as a freely elected representative of the people failed to guide her into first accepting the alleged bribe and her fate for doing so. 

 

Conditions of this nature attest that the vocation of politics is incomplete unless there are consequential political party member integrity management systems (MIMS)or frameworks. These incentivise politicians to pursue their vocation in the interest of society and not themselves. As the primary deterrent before the criminal justice system, MIMS enters the fray when conscience has failed deployees should be institutionalised in political parties as a condition for registering with the IEC. This will strike a blow at a systemic level, from the politician supply side to corruption and its adjuncts like state capture. 

 

The growing expectation of integrity from public representatives by the (foreign direct) investment community, a rule of law-based global governance system, which (now) includes indices on the integrity of elected public representatives and appointed officials, has become a more critical factor than democracy to determine the growth potential of nations. This has made the politician's integrity a public good owned beyond the narrow limitations of joining a particular political party. 

 

Internal party patronage, which has historically encouraged 'special privileges, access to graft and bribes, tax loopholes, sweetheart deals for cronies and judicial favouritism', has been foregrounded as a public interest matter whose continuation puts the country's entire political order into disrepute. It is this reality that a Ramaphosa presidency with its discontents will be recorded as having had the courage to confront the scourge of corruption even if it meant losing the internal party contest for president. Since the fateful 'we are accused number one statement', notable senior leaders of the governing party are living examples of how consequential the ANC's MIMS has been. The former CEO of the ANC, the former Head of the National Executive who could not have his alleged graft charges withdrawn, and now the chief lawmaker who had to resign after an illustrious thirty-year stint in the National Executive political leadership of South Africa have experience the commitment of the ANC to its renewal program. The list includes those excluded from the final list, which the ANC shall go to voters to be returned to power. 

 

The anti-corruption path Ramaphosa took remains one of the high-stakes and rivalrous decisions he has taken. The margins of his safety shrunk, commensurate with the tradeoffs between his primary power base and principle.  When threats of exposing his alleged involvement in malfeasance became dire, he demonstrated that his resolve to confront corruption was so firm that he did what it took to rally internal to the ANC and outside civil society coalitions. This kept his enemies from breaking through, thus plunging the country into further chaos. Ramaphosa maintained strong personalities implicated in graft among his allies, including the speaker. They were kept on the basis that morality in politics is a compass, not a straitjacket. For his renewal program sustainability and strategic national interest, Ramaphosa’s display of diplomacy and coalition building point toward a leader, despite his being compromised by past activities, consistent with the values he believes this democracy can survive the path to a failed state.

 

Such is the force of renewal and the power of the ANC's MIMS that the IEC was challenged for simply implementing a requirement that anyone convicted of a criminal offence cannot stand for election. In South Africa, nowhere has the display of corruption and state capture been so clear and damaging to the reputation of public representatives and the bureaucracy as in their appetite to litigate their wrongness into correctness. It is so deep that people litigate to be taken into confidence as to why they should be charged, a privilege they have once been charged. 

 

Without a fiercely robust and almost independent member integrity management system for governing parties ...society would have virtually no way of being assured that party political interests do not supersede national interests and the pursuit of a rule-based order. Left on their own and without a normative framework, powerful interest groups within or associated with political parties often prefer to keep malfeasance buried in the pursuit of interests.

 

In the whirlpool of losing its collective conscience on corruption and state capture, defending criminality with political rhetoric, and making heroes out of hyena conduct by some of its members, the governing party's voice of integrity and forthrightness grew into a potent substrate no majority of malfeasance could suffocate. The member integrity management system, which the ANC introduced at its 53rd National Conference in Mangaung, is an innovation on the public representative supply side this country will benefit from. Although not yet developed into a thesis of anti-corruption, it deserves to enter the hall of monumental policy statements the ANC has pronounced before. The renewal program inspired MIMS will be incomplete unless it promises the nation like the Freedom Charter did that "no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people, and no public representative shall be allowed to operate with the authority of government unless their integrity is consistent with the values our Constitution espouses."