Brian Klaas begins his magnificent book Corruptible: Who gets power and how it changes us with the story of Marc Ravalomanana, who was the president of Madagascar between 2002 and 2009.

Klaas sketches how Ravalomanana rose from selling yoghurt to become the richest man in Madagascar, and eventually president. He portrays a man who entered politics to change his country for the better but then rapidly descended into a caricature of corruption.

Klaas’ stated aim in his book, derived from hundreds of hours of interviews with many of the world’s most corrupt politicians and notorious dictators, is to try to understand whether it is power that corrupts, or whether corrupt people are drawn to the opportunities for corruption that politics provides.

Do good people get elected to office and then become corrupted by the system? If this is the case, then the solution, to some extent, is fixing the system and improving the checks and balances.

Or is it that corrupt, or corruptible people are drawn to power in order to use the system for their nefarious ends? Or perhaps a combination of both?

Early in the book, Klaas describes an ingenious study conducted in Bangalore, India. At the time of the experiment, India’s civil service was notorious for bribery and rampant corruption. The researchers were interested in whether certain types of people might become attracted to work in a place known for graft and corruption, and where it was an open secret that securing a civil service job would lead to many avenues in which to earn “extra money”.

University students were asked about their career aspirations. They were then asked to roll standard dice 42 times and to report (honestly) the results. They were also told upfront that if they were lucky rolling the dice and for some reason got more fives and sixes (and hence a higher final score), they would win more cash.

Of course, as the results were self-reported, lying was possible — and it seemed for many of the participants a necessity. There were even a few students who reported that they threw 42 sixes in a row.

To provide a sense of what was (falsely) reported, the final tally showed that the number six was recorded 25% of the time while the number one was reported only 10% of the time.

But the most important finding was the large number of “cheating students” who stated that the job they aspired to after qualification was to work for the Indian civil service.

When a similar study was conducted in Denmark, renowned for its impeccably honest and non-corrupt civil service, “cheating students” had no interest in joining the civil service but rather wanted to work in commerce.

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Power does corrupt. But corrupt institutions may also draw the corrupt and corruptible like moths to a flame.

What lessons might Klaas’ book and this experiment hold for trying to understand the state of the ANC and the governance of our country currently?

The tragicomedy that was the ANC’s 55th National Elective Conference in early December last year was an abject lesson in how far the ANC (and us) have fallen in terms of value-driven politics and governance. It was an open secret that bribes for votes during the conference were as free-flowing as the coffee at conference hotels.

Also, the two final candidates for president of the ANC consisted of an ex-health minister who had to resign in disgrace for irregular awarding of Covid-19 funds and our sitting President who had $500,000 in cash hidden in his couch in one of his properties.

In addition, the continued presence of the “dying” and unfathomably corrupt Jacob Zuma at the conference made an utter mockery of Cyril Ramaphosa’s banal and futile proclamations about “renewal”.

That the rot of corruption has infested virtually every aspect of the ANC is beyond doubt, of course.

There are always corrupt people in political organisations — this should come as no surprise. Before the Jacob Zuma kleptocracy, we had Tony Yengeni, Schabir Shaik and the Arms Deal.

But have we now reached the point where it is an entirely plausible hypothesis that every single member of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC) is irreparably corrupt?

Fifteen years ago, even with the Yengenis of the ANC, it might have been safe to assume that most people in the ANC and the NEC were not corrupt. Then, unlike now, the onus to prove rampant corruption would have been on the accuser (myself).

However, given where Zuma and his mafia cronies have taken us, and where the rest of the ANC have so willingly followed with State Capture, tenderpreneurship, political assassinations, Gothic levels of conflict of interest (Shell South Africa funding the ANC being simply the most egregious example), and Ramaphosa’s couch of cash, I would argue that the onus now is on the ruling party to prove to us that there is a single honest person in the NEC.

In this context, the lessons from Corruptible are that it can be safely assumed that anybody now joining the ANC is already corrupt, or at the very least utterly corruptible. Today, one of the quickest and surest ways to dodgy wealth in South Africa is to join the ANC.

And as recent events show, being fired for corruption (Zweli Mkhize) will certainly not put the brakes on our career progression within the ANC as you get promoted to head up social transformation.

Conversely, the very people that might assist in the clean-up of the ruling party are either simply not going to make the choice of a career in politics, or are going to be sidelined by the corrupt already at, or in line for their turn at the feeding trough.

In Genesis there is a line: “If I find 50 righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” Could we find 50, or even 10 honest or righteous people in the NEC of the ANC?

Sadly, I think the odds are exceedingly low. DM