Unpacking the defences and deflections around the Resolve Communications controversy

“Mad people” and “conspiracy theorists” spewing “fanciful ravings” and “complete nonsense” in a “mad feeding frenzy”.

These were some of the terms used by Resolve Communications chair Tony Leon to attack people asking questions about his lobbying firm’s way of doing business, in a video interview with News24 editor Adriaan Basson published on 5 July.

Leon’s response was rhetorically aggressive but substantively evasive. He and Resolve have been handed a gift in the form of the characterising of their lobbying activities as “State Capture” by other political parties, a comparison which is dramatically overstated and fails on several obvious metrics.

This flawed State Capture framing has permitted Leon, Resolve and various DA-aligned defenders to focus their outraged defence almost entirely on the easy task of pointing out the weaknesses in this analogy — while avoiding the other real issues at play.

Resolve and its friends have been working overtime to paint South Africans expressing concern as either DA-haters or laughably ignorant of the realities of contemporary politics or international lobbying practices.

In reality, there is substantial comparative evidence to suggest that if this same story was playing out in countries like the UK, Canada, Ireland, Germany, France or Australia, it would be treated as a serious potential conflict-of-interest and political-access controversy. The absence of clear evidence of lawbreaking would not change that.

During his News24 interview, Leon also seemed to imply that he was being unfairly scapegoated, and that the ANC always gets away with the same kind of blurred-lines behaviour. Leon suggested that the public should remember that Cyril Ramaphosa used his position in the ANC NEC to lean on the then minister of mineral resources, Susan Shabangu, while Ramaphosa was chair of Lonmin during the Marikana strike.

This ignores the reality that when ANC figures have been accused of this form of conflict of interest, they have been heavily criticised.

Ramaphosa’s conduct at Marikana in this specific regard was condemned by any number of influential figures.

These ranged from the SA Council of Churches’ Bishop Jo Seoka — who told the Farlam Commission that Ramaphosa’s use of “his political weight as a senior member of the ruling party to influence the state’s response” was a “clear conflict of interest” — to then-Cosatu head Zwelinzima Vavi, who said that when “a leader uses his political clout” to support the interests of a private company in this way, “the line between government and private capital completely dissolves”.

The ANC’s Progressive Business Forum, meanwhile, which trades access to ANC decision-makers for very expensive tickets to exclusive events, has been the source of controversy for almost two decades.

It also came in for criticism from the DA under Tony Leon’s leadership. The then DA MP Gareth Morgan asked former President Thabo Mbeki in Parliament in 2007 whether “it is appropriate for access to be made available to government ministers to certain sectors of the business community in exchange for monetary contributions to the party to which those ministers belong”.

Transparent, except for the transparency

“Resolve has at all times acted lawfully, transparently and in accordance with the recognised standards of our profession,” Leon wrote in a personally authored statement on 30 June.

Resolve, in a separate statement, described its lobbying as “lawful, transparent, ethical”.

In reality, the lobbying is not transparent at all — at least to the public.

When asked in his News24 interview, Leon refused to elaborate on either his clients’ aims or his firm’s activities, suggesting that other companies could “copycat” Resolve’s methods.

Resolve also told Daily Maverick, in response to an invitation to reveal its client list, that it would not do so because it had “a fiduciary duty to protect and defend the legal and proprietary rights of our company, our clients, and our employees”.

There is no South African law imposing such a requirement on PR, public affairs or lobbying firms. This is demonstrated by the fact that one of South Africa’s biggest lobbying firms, the Ethicore Group — which also offers clients government engagements and helps influence policy — publishes its clients on its website.

Resolve, by contrast, offers only anonymised testimonials. Client confidentiality is a promise made by Resolve to its clients, rather than a statutory duty imposed on it.

Leon has also said that Resolve employees must sign an internal code of conduct — but since this is not publicly available, we have no way of assessing its contents.

Leon claimed in his 30 June statement that the firm was “entirely comfortable with fair, fact-based scrutiny”.

Yet when Daily Maverick produced fair, fact-based scrutiny in the form of an investigation meticulously tracing documented records to show how a Resolve-COO-turned-DA-MP’s advocacy coincided with the narrow demands of two Resolve clients, Resolve accused us of executing a “hatchet job”.

Leon’s conviction that his firm’s conduct is beyond reproach and ethically uncontroversial is also difficult to square with two moments in the News24 interview when he appeared unsure what his own company’s activities actually consist of.

When Basson asked whether it was “standard practice” for Resolve to draft questions for MPs, Leon responded: “I have no idea. I’m sure it’s part of a range of things.”

When Basson asked whether Resolve was running social media campaigns for Starlink around the 30% B-BBEE requirement, Leon replied: “I’m not aware of that. If there is, I can let you know. And let me tell you something, let’s assume that — I don’t think we do this kind of stuff. Maybe we do.”

Acceptable lobbying by international standards?

Leon, Resolve and various DA-aligned figures have presented Resolve’s practices as standard practice internationally.

“That is the proper work of public affairs, conducted in every functioning democracy on earth,” Leon wrote.

Resolve described its activities as “entirely consistent with accepted professional practice in South Africa and internationally”.

The obvious difference, repeatedly pointed out, is that South Africa entirely lacks the legal scaffolding through which lobbying is policed and disclosed in many functioning democracies.

In Canada, which is generally regarded as the country with the best-practice lobbying regime, lobbyists are legally required to register, comply with a national Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct, and submit monthly reports on their activities, including the government departments or agencies being contacted, and to what end for their clients.

Leon’s concern that disclosure might allow Resolve’s techniques to be “copied” would hold no water there. Breaches of Canada’s Lobbying Act can lead to criminal penalties, including imprisonment.

Canada also imposes a five-year prohibition on former designated public office holders carrying out forms of paid lobbying covered by the Act, expressly to prevent senior political figures from using advantages and personal connections acquired in public office. The category does not only cover former government ministers, but also ordinary MPs, including the leader of the opposition, as well as staff in the office of the leader of the opposition.

Why would this particular provision be written into law?

Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal answered that question in a 2009 judgment:

“A lobbyist’s stock in trade is his or her ability to gain access to decision-makers, so as to attempt to influence them directly by persuasion and facts. Where the lobbyist’s effectiveness depends upon the decision-maker’s personal sense of obligation to the lobbyist, or on some other private interest created or facilitated by the lobbyist, the line between legitimate lobbying and illegitimate lobbying has been crossed.”

Leon’s repeated defences that the DA ministers or other party representatives being asked to meet with his clients are not “victims” but “adults with agency” reveal a deliberate obtuseness about how power dynamics play out between a party grandee known to have played an influential role in DA processes at various points in the last few years, and the DA representatives who earn their salaries at the pleasure of the DA’s leadership.

Most Western democracies take a similar view to Canada’s: that the exploiting of political relationships for the commercial benefit of external third parties by former politicians and their staffers is fundamentally undesirable.

Former UK prime minister David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, warned in a 2010 speech: “We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.”

A decade later, Cameron himself would be embroiled in a major scandal after repeatedly lobbying former colleagues and senior government officials on behalf of Greensill Capital, a finance firm in which he had a financial stake. The resulting parliamentary inquiry concluded that Cameron had “showed a significant lack of judgment”, particularly because his “ability to use an informal approach was aided by his previous position as Prime Minister”.

The inquiry acknowledged that Cameron had broken no rules or laws. It said this “reflects on the insufficient strength of the rules, and there is a strong case for strengthening them”.

Importantly, Cameron’s lobbying also failed to secure Greensill’s main objective. That did not lessen the public censure.

This matters because there have been repeated suggestions that Resolve’s apparent inability to achieve certain aims, despite Leon’s alleged political connectedness, makes the entire affair fundamentally benign. That is not how lobbying scandals are judged in functioning democracies concerned with the ability of undisclosed interests to shape policy.

Leon and DA-aligned figures also appear intent on persuading the public that a lobbying scandal becomes serious only when there is hard proof that money changed hands improperly. That is simply false.

One of the first major British controversies of this kind came to light in 1998. Lobbyist Derek Draper, a former staffer to Tony Blair’s close aide Peter Mandelson, had to resign in disgrace after telling an undercover reporter posing as a US businessman that he had access to “the 17 people who count” in the British government and could easily arrange meetings with key officials.

Draper was never prosecuted, because he had not committed an illegal act. His conduct was nonetheless treated as a major scandal, dubbed “Lobbygate” by the media.

Just last month, the incoming British prime minister, Andy Burnham’s decision to appoint lobbyist James Purnell to his team caused consternation. Purnell is a former Labour Cabinet minister who went on to head the lobbying firm Flint Global. An openDemocracy investigation found that the firm had secured at least 38 meetings with ministers, special advisers and government officials as a result of Purnell’s access.

“There is no suggestion that Flint has broken any rules,” openDemocracy stated — but that did not make the arrangement ethically unimpeachable.

It exposed what openDemocracy called “major flaws in Westminster’s lobbying transparency rules”.

Not merely normal, but a gift to democracy

Leon has gone further than arguing that Resolve’s work is normal. He has presented lobbying as a democratic good: “It is a service to the democratic process, through which the concerns of those affected by government decisions are made known to those who take them.”

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) publishes guidelines for lobbying, which recognise that policymakers benefit from outside information and expertise. But the OECD also warns that lobbying without safeguards can produce asymmetric or undue influence, and that transparency and accountability are needed to level the field between competing interests.

The flipside of Leon’s position is that lobbying can also distort the democratic process, because it can mean that clients with money get access that the less privileged or connected do not.

Leon explicitly acknowledged in his interview with News24 that “getting meetings with any minister in this country is a Herculean task”. If that is true for Leon, how much more so for citizens who are not veteran political insiders?

In his 2010 speech, years before his own lobbying scandal, David Cameron articulated a different danger: “I believe that secret corporate lobbying … goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works.”

The Resolve controversy presents an opportunity for a serious and long-overdue national discussion of the laws necessary to rein in the invisible influence of corporate interests on government policy, regardless of which lobbying firm brokers access to which political party. But that requires, as a starting point, the acknowledgement that many of the concerns currently being expressed are both legitimate and internationally shared. DM