Fixation on the Guptas covers deeper ills

Sometimes, revealing the truth can be a way of denying it. Right now, worry about what is wrong with this country has again boiled down to one family and the politicians it owns. This tells one truth, but hides another.

The truth it tells is that the Guptas use money to undermine the democracy so many died to achieve. The one it hides is that they are symptoms of a deeper problem and, fixation with a single family prevents the country from facing it.

The latest “disclosures” about SA’s least-favourite family have attracted publicity not because they are news — bar a couple of details, they confirm what everyone who does not believe ANN7 or the Gupta PR machine already knows.

Whether they are behind a “silent coup” in SA is debatable but that does not alter the reality — that they are poster children for the important idea that democracies can remain democratic only if they curb the use of money to influence politics. The Gupta stories dominate debate not because they tell us anything new; their role is to keep up the pressure on the family and its captured politicians – restating the obvious can sometimes help campaigns for change. But, if it helps to restate what is already known about the Guptas, it also helps to serve as a reminder that concentrating on them alone can deny problems that need to be faced.

The problem with fixating on the Guptas is that it creates the illusion of a political system and economy that was in good shape until they began to interfere and will return to health when they are gone. To see why this is an illusion, imagine that the Guptas are finally forced to stop.

There might then be a finance and an energy minister who is more widely trusted: some state-owned enterprises’ purchases might be guided more by the needs of the country than those of a particular family. But that would not even remotely signal the end of collusion between sections of the government and parts of business that subverts democracy.

When the Guptas go, social grant beneficiaries will still need the courts to protect them from a minister who endorses “radical economic transformation” while giving business to a multinational that, according to the Constitutional Court, has no black economic empowerment credentials.

Cigarette-smuggling rings will still work with allies inside and outside the government to drive skilled investigators out of the South African Revenue Service.

Municipal officials who are accused of hacking into billing systems to ensure that companies that bribed them do not pay for services will not disappear.

Nor will the dinners at which companies pay thousands of rand to “network” with politicians in ways that ensure that money matters more than voters.

The Guptas did not invent arrangements in which the monied have more influence over elected politicians than voters. Research showed that under apartheid, many CEOs did not take business associations seriously: they insisted that the best way to influence cabinet ministers was to phone them.

This was not necessarily corrupt, but it began a pattern in which a quiet word out of public view mattered more than talks that everyone could see and follow.

The seeds of the current problem were sown in the years before 1994, when businesses were working out a relationship with a new political elite that lacked all the trappings that come with power — most had no car or suburban home, let alone good schools for their children or membership of the right clubs.

Some businesses supplied them the necessary. Many were not trying to buy politicians, but a pattern was established that made public-office holders beholden to private money.

Links with politicians helped businesses in another way — they needed more black participation and the most obvious candidates were the activists and politicians they met across the tables where the future was negotiated. And so, shares and seats on boards and other routes into the private economy went to the politically connected as a substitute for finding and recognising black business talent.

Not only is collusion between businesses and politicians common, it reflects a wider problem — the failure to open the economy to the energies of many who were shut out by apartheid.

Deals with the politically connected meant that some black people could be absorbed into an economy that carried on much as it had in the past. And so, there was no need to discuss removing the barriers that kept most people out.

Cosy links between business and politics are, therefore, one way of avoiding the change the economy needs. Because all this would stay if the Guptas go tomorrow, focusing on them alone is as much a way of ducking a problem as of facing one.

The country needs the Guptas to go — not only for the damage they do but because, until they do, it may be impossible to begin a serious discussion of the problems of which they are a symptom.

SHARES AND SEATS ON BOARDS WENT TO THE POLITICALLY CONNECTED AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR FINDING AND RECOGNISING BLACK BUSINESS TALENT