ANC must act wisely or it will hurtle to its demise
KPMG must give us all truth
IT HAS been a decade of decline and ignominy for the ANC. The gap between the ideals of the party and what it has become has never been wider.
The qualitative difference between leaders of the past and the leadership available to the party today has become sharper than the contrast between night and day.
But the bottom still beckons seductively to an ANC that is governed by the base and amoral political instincts of members and leaders who belong to cults that worship the power of greed and derive power from drinking opponents’ blood.
The ANC has not hit the bottom yet. The day the bottom comes, it will be more spectacular than the bloody scenes at the Eastern Cape provincial conference at the weekend. To paraphrase a question about President Jacob Zuma that someone asked me at the national congress of the South African Communist Party two months ago: “Why do some leaders of the ANC hate the ANC, the governing party, so much?”
As I argued in a column a few weeks ago, there is an askari element that will not rest until it has accomplished the mission of destroying the ANC from within and by forging alliances with external forces that have always been hostile to the idea of a society that, in terms of race, economic, social and other relations, will be the antithesis of apartheid society.
In this respect, the internecine battles in the ANC can be characterised in many ways.
The two I wish to isolate, are: First, the political adventurism of the misguided who have been duped by corrupt factionalists into believing that they are part of an agenda for radical and revolutionary change, and, second, the conservatives who are committed to the retention of apartheid economic relations, who must protect their stake in the current economic order and have succeeded in fooling too many among us into thinking they are the good guys.
However, if we are serious about getting closer to the truth, we must go to the ANC in exile and the underground to find part of the answer. Nostalgia will not suffice because, like its cousins, selective memory and morality, it is a form of selective perception and, therefore, a form of false consciousness. The ANC of Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, Charlotte Maxeke and Dorothy Nyembe is gone and shall never be again, and maybe that is a good thing since what is needed is a new ANC.
What is needed is an ANC that is a qualitative improvement on both the ANC of today and yesterday.
Nostalgia is a problem because it tends to gloss over the fact that some of the corruption we see today is a continuation of what was obtained before 1994.
It is a function of a political culture of exile and underground politics of struggle, which, itself, was a combination of the noble and ignoble.
The ignoble has outlived the noble and that is why the ANC is inexorably hurtling towards implosion.
The current situation is, therefore, a product of the continuity of the ignoble. It is also a function of the demonic dance between the enemy within and the enemy outside the ANC, with too many in the leadership and membership of the party playing the role of chief enemy to the ANC, SA and its people.
Then there is the role played by tricksters and con artists in designer sheepskin, beneath which lies the predatory instincts of political wolves and the parasitic tendencies of scavengers.
The battle between the enemy within and the predatory scavengers will reduce the ANC to a carcass, and history will devour the remains. FOR a business to business concern it’s quite amazing how many individuals have been ruined by KPMG, the disgraced auditing firm. Just as surprising has been its clumsy response to the crisis that has engulfed it.
After months of piecemeal diversionary tactics including internal reviews, in September it let go of its mahogany row including CE Trevor Hoole. And, curiously, it withdrew portions of a report it prepared for the South African Revenue Service (SARS) in respect of its alleged rogue spy unit and offered to pay back the fees it received from the tax-collecting authority.
The response also included the appointment of Nhlamu Dlomu as CE. As part of her first act, poor Dlomu has had to facilitate private sessions in which KPMG offers personal apologies to special victims of its skulduggery including former finance minister Pravin Gordhan and former SARS officials such as Ivan Pillay and members of the so-called spy unit.
The less special victims including a friend who was harassed out of the country, have yet to receive a mea culpa call from KPMG.
The rest of the country is battling to deal with what is essentially a black-and-white matter. Big business, through Business Leadership SA, has suspended KPMG’s membership and the Institute of Directors has distanced itself from the firm. Like Hulisani and Sasfin, parliament and its medical aid have sacked KPMG as auditors. The SA Institute of Chartered Accountants has announced an inquiry of sorts.
The big banks are still unsure about what to do with KPMG, which audits most of them. But the central bank, their regulator, is understood to be nervous about the banks firing KPMG as this might destabilise the financial system. The auditor-general’s office has already said it won’t fire KPMG – this, of course, despite a call by the finance ministry to review all relationships between KPMG and government entities, of which there are many.
KPMG plays an important role in the country beyond taxes and the employment it provides to thousands. It cannot collapse.
Similarly, it would be immoral to ignore the damage it has done to individuals and this country. The question that remains is, what should KPMG do to retain its social and business licence to operate in this country?
The parent company either doesn’t understand the scale of the crisis facing its South African operation or doesn’t care – otherwise it would have deployed resources to help resolve the crisis.
For Dlomu, who has been given a hospital pass, it’s clear she needs to do something big to restore the public’s trust in the company. Unfortunately, maintaining the bottom line isn’t the big thing that is required. Neither is repeating the halfhearted apology offered by the company.
This exercise cannot take place in an opaque process or another KPMG internal investigation. What is required is painful and potentially embarrassing, but necessary.
The first thing she will have to do is accept that what has happened here is much more than an aberration – this is about the culture of the company. Letting go of the leadership and some partners is a small but important step. But hard as it is to accept, it would be naive to think the wrongdoing was limited to a few individuals. Fixing the culture of the company should be her main priority. And this might require firing more people who might be considered good for the fees but bad for ethics.
Second, all the special victims have, quite rightly, asked KPMG to fully account for its (mis)conduct. Explaining this away or focusing on the good it has done in the past doesn’t constitute accountability. A start would be coming out clearly about who ordered the withdrawal of portions of the SARS report and why.
This exercise cannot take place in an opaque process or another KPMG internal investigation. What is required is painful and potentially embarrassing, but necessary. Nothing less than full openheart surgery is required to help exorcise KPMG’s demons.
Dlomu cannot do this alone. She needs a credible independent inquiry into what occurred at KPMG, who the actors were and how long it has been going on. She needs to appoint someone with unimpeachable integrity and preferably out of active legal practice. She needs someone like Dikgang Moseneke, former deputy chief justice, to lead the inquiry.
Furthermore, it would be counterproductive to appoint such an inquiry and keep its results secret. The public needs to know the outcome of the probe. This is a hard assignment. But it’s not undoable. Dlomu needs support from all stakeholders, especially her colleagues. Internally and externally, she needs the support of a chairman with gravitas to help open the doors she cannot. It is hard to think of anyone who commands more respect than Wiseman Nkuhlu to help restore trust in KPMG.
John Dludlu a former Sowetan editor, is founder of Orwell Advisory Services