President Cyril Ramaphosa is trapped between a party patronage network that could recall him – or try to recall him, given the Government of National Unity (GNU) – and a country collapsing under procurement graft. He’s kept us in self-therapy through commissions and outrage cycles. Following the Zondo Commission, he now proposes a National Dialogue that could come to almost three-quarters of the Zondo commission’s cost.
In many democracies, government contractors also fund election campaigns. When those contractors get away with murder, a conciliatory head of state like Ramaphosa invites government, business, labour and civil society to a “compact” to restore social trust. This call for conversation helped him stall through a global pandemic, the unrest of July 2021 and load shedding.
This turns public resilience into resignation, or more dangerously, into resentment that seeks scapegoats. We then see health officials blame foreign nationals for the consequences of their departments’ procurement corruption.
Whenever someone asks, “Why isn’t there enough?”, someone’s there to answer, “The people you were raised to distrust finished everything” to draw attention from politicians’ abuse of public resources.
Ramaphosa’s peacebuilder persona makes him a foil to politicians who openly foment xenophobia and other prejudices, but they belong to the same party.
The cracks are showing
At the time of writing this, the DA’s John Steenhuisen had given Ramaphosa 48 hours to fire a list of ANC ministers, like he fired DA Trade, Industry and Competition Deputy Minister Andrew Whitfield. If not, “all bets are off”. We’re still waiting…
According to Daily Maverick, Steenhuisen says Whitfield was probably dismissed because he “opposed an attempt to make suspect appointments” and stood “in the way of the looting” after DTIC Minister Parks Tau announced a R100-billion transformation fund”.
If Steenhuisen’s right, this fund is just another Public Enterprise and Supplier Development initiative to enrich politically connected beneficiaries. Ramaphosa’s expensive conversations and commissions strengthen the impression that the symptom (divisiveness) is the sickness, and that procurement corruption isn’t the main problem, but “mistakes” that “have been made”. His calls for compacts are not merely symbolic; they’re strategically insufficient.
There is a way to make procurement theft less attractive to political parties. In an experiment some colleagues and I are conceptualising, each government contract has built into it a transparent, auditable profit split across five directions:
- Towards the contractor;
- Towards an enterprise development project or civil society organisation, especially those that leverage political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental (Pestle) analysis to increase voter turnout and civic engagement;
- Towards traditional media;
- Towards our administrative costs, which include audit and legal fees; and
- Towards the political party behind the government official who championed procuring the value proposition pitched by the contractor.
This offers a more honest structuring of what’s already happening, with transparency, auditability and measurable public value. Without the threat of prosecution for routing parts of the profits back to a political party, some contractors would be more willing to be subjected to a value-for-the-public test. It’s a complex, controversial brokerage model I hope others test and document publicly so we can learn from their experiences.
You may be wondering why this seemingly random cluster of bullet-pointed elements was necessary.
It’s the minimum viable structure of State Capture, now repurposed for broader public benefit and participation. Donor disclosure laws tell us who paid, not what they bought. This alternative model is the pragmatic evolution of checks and balances that can’t keep patronage out. Instead of creating “good guys” and “bad guys” – which is peak scapegoating – it opens up the paradigm of “good systems” and “bad systems” and the opportunity for party leaders like Ramaphosa to redeem their legacies.
In conventional State Capture, profits flowed as in this proposed model, but to fund ideological indoctrination at branches and other structures that hijacked enterprise development.
Instead of funding media, conventional State Capture hired nano-influencers and PR firms like Bell Pottinger to undermine real journalism. In conventional State Capture, we can barely enforce party funding transparency laws.
Growing a culture of vigilance
In a recent PowerFM interview, Rise Mzansi’s Executive Director Boitumelo Mpakanyane noted that the Independent Electoral Commission has just “seven human beings” tracking the funding and enforcing the rules; he suggests that agencies like the Financial Intelligence Centre, South African Revenue Services or the Special Investigating Unit could help.
But aren’t these institutions paralysed in the face of State Capture transactions? This won’t be solved by getting them to zoom in on party funding, which is just a subset of State Capture, but by regulating the party funding that will always happen, and will always happen from procurement payouts.
In the words of late Eskom board chair Jabu Mabuza, “the name is corruption but the game is procurement.”
The only alternative to State Capture is a competing model in which auditors, lawyers and media search not for whether the party got a kickback (because it will), but whether there was enough value for money created for the public to justify the whole value chain.
This justification has a specific shape where value for money means the strengthening of systems and group behaviours that sustain the growth of the tax base and the proper reinvestment of tax funds by growing a culture of vigilance around democracy, hence media funding, hence voter turnout and Pestle analysis.
The political parties that experiment with this model could enjoy sustainable growth in funding and electoral support. DM