Advances converged to hint at a historical turn.
The Cyril Ramaphosa renewal brigade notched up the appointment of the Free State interim provincial task team, testifying to a political solution to the province’s factional stalemate around branch corruption.
Zandile Gumede stepped down (aside) as a KwaZulu-Natal member of the provincial legislature.
The ANC National Working Committee pronounced against Ace Magashule, Carl Niehaus and Tony Yengeni, consolidating Ramaphosa’s stronger position in the National Executive Committee.
The National Youth Task Team had middle-aged Zumaists exorcised from its ranks.
Former president Jacob Zuma took that unprecedented step at the Pietermaritzburg arms deal trial.
It could have been an unadulterated historic moment of celebrating a new, cleaned-up African National Congress.
Yet, in the wings, there is a rogue parade of corruption-tainted leaders from across ANC factions. They range from the newly implicated to those bearing longer-term question marks related to engagements on contracts, procurement and favours to friends.
The list includes many who have, or have had, an eye on higher ANC and national office. There is mud on their aspirations. Beyond the leadership list is an avalanche of comrades who have benefited in some similar, favoured ways, or are guilty in their silences and complicity.
In the months and years ahead, this diverse group will test the ANC’s disciplinary apparatuses. Two certainties rule: wrongdoers will not be going down alone and the ANC’s disciplinary systems appear poorly equipped for what lies ahead.
It may be edifying to assess how robust the ANC’s clean-up apparatuses are. Is there a sense of urgency and enabled processes that would help the ANC deal with these problems in good time, for example, before new leadership elections will take place in December 2022? By available signals, a quagmire of interlocking corruption definitions, processes and institutions define the battlefield.
Three years-plus after the ANC and South Africa’s Ramaphoria, four dynamics drive the already mauled ANC clean-up architecture: there is obfuscation in the ANC’s classification of degrees of corruption; uncertainty rules on whether sanctions against wrongdoers should apply in the party or the state or both; the party vacillates in determining who the disciplining agency will be (the ANC or the sites of state and government deployment); and confusion rules in what the intra-ANC hierarchy of authority is in executing the disciplinary processes.
These questions are germane, especially in light of Ramaphosa’s dictum of letting “the processes run their course”.
First is the differentiation between levels of deeds on the spectrum of corruption. For example, the ANC is battling to draw the lines between those alleged to be involved in corruption and those implicated in corruption through direct benefit being gained or benefit accruing to comrades and friends.
Ideological corruption, such as being entrapped in white monopoly capital, is a pervasive category.
A potent type of corruption is whether political oversight has been exercised and when to call it out for “a calculated blind eye being turned”.
Accused but not charged (yet being investigated) is next on the escalating scale of wrongdoing. Then follow “charged” and possibly “out on bail”. Next, “case in progress”, followed by conviction and ultimately the nature of the sentence and whether there is an option of a fine.
The sliding scale is at the centre of the ANC’s corruption morass.
The second ANC discipline indecision is whether sanction for wrongdoing should be applied to positions in the ANC or the state. This can mean the difference between political life and death.
Yet, the ANC still needs to stabilise its thinking on the difference between being disciplined through sanctioning position-holding in the party or the state, including holding of legislative positions across Parliament, provincial legislatures and councils.
Further differentiations that cry out for clarification across ANC structures is with whether the implicated or charged may hold on to ordinary membership in the legislative institution, or ordinary membership of the ANC, but have to relinquish leadership positions. Perhaps they will be allowed to sit out existing terms.
KwaZulu-Natal has opened the door to people in the disciplinary maelstrom being allowed to contest for office. The sanction may also range in general status from “temporary suspension”, to suspension, to expulsion.
The third ANC disciplinary puzzle to solve is to figure out which internal ANC or public-state disciplinary processes will be activated to deal with ANC wrongdoers who are deployed in the state.
If the locus of discipline resides within the ANC, the fourth dynamic comes into play: which ANC disciplinary process unfolds exactly when, and with what implications for the rest of the processes and institutions. Plans on paper are easier than in practice, the ANC has been learning.
The Gauteng cases of Dr Bandile Masuku and Khusela Diko are instructive. The ANC’s internal structures (the provincial and national disciplinary committees) have had their contrasting verdicts; the state’s Special Investigating Unit had adverse findings on Masuku and the presidency’s own internal investigation into Diko is unfolding.
Clarifications will have to follow: who is the uber authority in the hierarchy (if there is a clearcut one) of disciplining institutions? What is the exact relation between the ANC’s disciplinary committees (national and provincial) and its integrity commission?
A post-integrity commission appeals structure has now been established. What happens if state and ANC verdicts on wrongdoing diverge? The greatest challenge of them all will be for the ANC to keep track in this maze of moving parts and maintain equitability in its operationalisation of the system — if one, integrated system can actually be configured.
Such vexed disciplinary dynamics have obvious implications for an organisation in which there is a wilful co-existence of the clean, those in the process of coming clean or claiming that they are trying, and a multitude of shades of not clean, cannot ever be clean and having faith in getting away with being corrupt.
The ANC mantra appears to “be seen to be working on it”.
The reality for voters and citizens who are watching this space is: do not expect a clean-up miracle to be lurking. What we see now is what we shall get, for a considerable time to come. The eye of the needle quivers, as the ANC works on it. DM