Gripping tale of dirty apartheid arms deal outs global financiers

Hennie van Vuuren’s new book, Apartheid Guns and Money, is an important milestone in the understanding of corruption in contemporary SA. Analysts of corruption have mostly focused on the internal dynamics of the ANC in the pre- and postapartheid eras. Studies have traced the malfeasance that scarred the ANC’s long period in exile and the importation of malign practices when the exile-dominated leadership returned to domestic soil in the early 1990s.

Deeply corrupt Bantustan politicians and officials were imported into the new SA — and into the liberation movement — after 1991. Reflection on the behaviour of trade unionists and the United Democratic Front in the 1980s has revealed corrupt churchmen and activists, proliferating bank accounts and a stubborn “struggle accounting” legacy.

Attention has also been paid to the culture of entitlement and impunity that has marked the ANC’s notable families — the Mandelas as much as the Zumas. The resulting understanding of postapartheid corruption has had two severe limitations. The country has rarely been situated in a wider global and comparative context. The money politics that flourishes here is similar in intensity and character to that in most countries at a similar level of socioeconomic development such as Mexico, Thailand, Malaysia and Brazil.

The exchange of government contracts for party donations and “pay for play” conventions, in which money is a prerequisite for access to government business, are commonplace. So too is the deployment of party activists to state-owned enterprises, where they divert money to the governing party — as well as to themselves.

A second limitation has been the near silence among students of malfeasance about the grand corruption of late apartheid, a lacuna that Van Vuuren’s study admirably fills. The book details the “criminal economy” of late apartheid, as a dying regime sought to circumvent sanctions. This is a gripping tale that weaves together apartheid apparatchiks, local and international businesspeople and politicians and financiers globally.

Even before 1994, apartheid’s corrupt actors “ingratiated themselves into the new order”, contributing to the “arms deal” that did so much to undermine hopes of clean postapartheid government. Critics may complain that the arms deal that is the book’s focus pales into significance in the face of current burgeoning parastatal corruption and patronage. The costs of the arms deal were contained: this was corruption in a nascent state, and not the corruption of the state that is now being experienced.

This is a week, after all, in which a post-Pravin Gordhan Treasury has touted the Public Investment Corporation as a potential “public equity partner” of the loss-making South African Airways.

SOCIETY CANNOT GRAPPLE WITH ANC CORRUPTION TODAY IF IT GLOSSES OVER THE NATIONAL PARTY CORRUPTION OF YESTERDAY

But Van Vuuren’s key insight holds: the society cannot grapple with ANC (“black”) corruption today if it glosses over the National Party (“white”) corruption of yesterday. Responding to a journalist’s questions at the recent World Economic Forum Africa about Eskom’s controversial acting CEO, Matshela Koko, the parastatal’s chairman, Ben Ngubane, angrily said, “this country was based on robbery and theft… If the country is founded on lack of morality, as this country was through so many years through apartheid and colonialism, let’s be careful how we characterise black people and black-led institutions.”

The truth about the past needs to be told — for the sake of the future.