Status quo made ‘financial capture’ of ANC a fait accompli

ONE OF the most crucial and successful elements of the Struggle and the ANC as a liberation movement was its projection of itself as a people-centred and principled liberation movement, deeply embedded in revolutionary values of personal and collective sacrifice and responsibility.

It was the projection of such incorruptibility that the ANC set against the exact opposite for the apartheid regime and its corporate backers. The subsequent “moral authority” the ANC gained, greatly helped along by the iconisation of Nelson Mandela as the personal bedrock of that authority was central to its ongoing mass support and eventual electoral triumph in 1994.

This was precisely because it provided the generalised basis for a relationship of trust between the ANC, their members and the majority of people.

However, the foundations of the house that the ANC took political control over in 1994 were rotten and a significant pillar of those rotten foundations was the in-built and widespread corruption of the apartheid state and corporate capital during the apartheid era.

While some specifically apartheid pillars, such as formalised racial separation and control were quickly dug up and replaced, most others were retained as the “price” of the negotiated settlement.

Crucially, the retention of the existing, core institutional architecture of the state as well as the economic order ensured that when the ANC came to power, it began to build the “new” South Africa on deeply embedded corrupt foundations. Those foundations remain largely in place 22 years later.

Throughout the history of corporate capital, corruption has always been at the centre of its insatiable drive to reap profit and to find new and inventive ways to further exploit both human and natural resources. At the centre of that pursuit is the ideological and financial “capture” (the successful outcome of a corrupting process) of dominant political parties in power and thus also, of the institutional purpose and policy direction of the national state. This has been most often and most effectively been realised through the individual and class corruption of leading party politicians and state bureaucrats/officials.

In the South African context, the most telling early transitional example of the success of this corrupting process is the fact corporate capital literally got away without having to pay for a whole range of corrupt, criminal activities and the active participation in and support of a system that was a crime against humanity. In allowing corporate capital to seamlessly transfer its corrupting frame into the “new” democratic South Africa, the ANC (re)placed itself – the state it now politically controlled and South African society as a whole – squarely within that frame.

Simply put, the corporate model in South Africa has always been, and remains, synonymous with corruption. Given their post-apartheid “get-outof-jail-free” card, the acceptance and endorsement of their continued dominance of the economic realm and the ANC’s own dominant politics of accession and incorporation, corporate capital’s model has found a sympathetic and participative partner in the ANC/ state.

As a result, it has increasingly become like a two-headed parasite attached to the very heart of South Africa’s postapartheid political economy. Like every main parasite feeding off of its host, it attracts other parasites and if left untreated, multiplies and soon enough overwhelms the host.

To give but one specific, illustrative example, throughout the apartheid era but particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, the apartheid regime and its agents “were engaged in systemic economic crime to bust sanctions, buy favours abroad, and fund their dirtytricks campaigns at home”. What this did in parallel was to create “criminal networks between the state and the private sector” which in turn, provided ample opportunities “for a small group of individuals to use the cloak of secrecy to steal vast amounts of money and move it overseas”.

One of the key sanctions-busting movers and shakers was oil trader Marc Rich, who founded the commodity trading and mining company Glencore in 1974. After fleeing the US in 1983 when he was indicted on tax evasion charges and illegal business dealings, Rich set up shop in Switzerland and soon became indispensable to the apartheid regime’s oil-for-cash global criminal network. Not long before his death in 2013, Rich admitted his relationship with the apartheid state was his “most important and most profitable” business and that bribery had played a large part in making Glencore so successful.

The end of apartheid was not the end of Glencore’s relationship with South Africa. Through various subsidiaries and partner companies, notably the mining firms Trafigura and then later, Xstrata, Glencore emerged as a major player, investing in almost every aspect of mining and trading of the country’s vast quantities of mineral resources. This was despite its founder’s criminal past and the company’s central role in oiling the apartheid machinery.

As the mining sector became the centrepiece of the ANC’s BEE programme, so too did Glencore (now run by Rich’s protégé, South African born Ivan Glasenberg) become further enmeshed with leading ANC figures. When Glencore bought out South Africa’s biggest coal mining operation, Optimum Coal (which supplies the state power company Eskom) in 2012, none other than BEE kingpin and ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa was appointed chairperson.

But that is not where the story ends. In late 2015, Glencore sold Optimum to Tegeta Exploration & Resources, a company set up by the Gupta family, whose close links with the ANC and President Zuma, and shady business deals with his family, have been at the centre of our political discourse for years.

In the case of this transaction it should have come as little surprise that Zuma acolyte and Department of Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane had earlier flown to Switzerland to meet Glasenberg and that just three weeks before the purchase almost half of Tegeta’s shares were transferred to a company owned by Zuma’s son, Duduzane.

Connect the dots and the linked picture of pre and post-1994 corruption in South Africa becomes clearer. In the words of the excellent “Open Secrets” research collective: “In no small part, the massive incidence of economic crime that plagues our democracy today is a result of our failure to dismantle the criminal networks that thrived under apartheid.”

That’s why the ANC’s unilateral adoption of Gear and then vigorous pursuit of the corporate-friendly policies that flowed from it is so central to understanding the continuity of corruption in South Africa.

Shorn of its technocratic econodevelopmental speak, Gear and its successor programmes are simply about following the prescripts of a neo-liberalism that is inherently corrupt. That corruption stems from neo-liberalism’s starting point, which (as Pierre Bourdieu points to) posits that “competition (is) the defining characteristic of human relations”.

Since the “neo-liberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses”, competition in our contemporary capitalist world, which is dominated by the very political and economic elites who champion neoliberalism, can only ever be corrupt.

In other words, if your “team” makes up the rules of the game, owns the venue where the game is played, comprises the most dominant players in the game and chooses the referee for the game, then the game will always only and forever have one outcome.

While there can definitely be internal competition among your “team” over the contingent privileges of dominance for the other “team” (that is, the vast majority of humanity), the competition they are then forced to engage in is predominately one of survival.

Corporate capital’s model has found a sympathetic partner

This is an extract from South Africa’s Corporatised Liberation: A critical analysis of the ANC in power by Dale McKinley, published by Jacana Media at a recommended retail price of R240.