We have commissions for Africa and a vital one that’s off the radar
President Cyril Ramaphosa favoured us with another commission of inquiry this week. We now have these commissions coming out of our ears. It seems our president can’t help himself. He is, to resort to a cliché, the gift that keeps giving. And spare a thought for the lawyers. Poor things. They’re making a killing.
There is nothing wrong with commissions. Exposing raw facts about wrongdoing or malfeasance can be a devastating political weapon. It can also help construct a narrative that is digestible to the public and makes for better decision-making by the government. It becomes a problem when commissions are seen as substitute for taking firm and immediate action.
And these things don’t come cheap. An infrastructure has to be created from scratch — office space, IT systems, secretaries, receptionists, security guards, cleaners, tea ladies, and lawyers and their hangers-on. Offering a ready-made infrastructure for our now ubiquitous commissions could be a lucrative business for some enterprising tenderpreneurs.
The commissions could end up tripping over each other though. We have the allencompassing state capture commission under Raymond Zondo and the Nugent inquiry into the devastation at Sars. This week Ramaphosa obliged with another, one that will investigate poor decisions and possible corruption at the PIC that could have cost the country billions. Bantu Holomisa, who has the bit between his teeth on this one, wants the government to even enlist Interpol. We are deficient in many things, but not ambition. He wants us to go global.
If a commission of inquiry into Sars or the PIC, why not Eskom, where the destruction has been as devastating?
One hopes, though, that such instruments won’t be a permanent fixture. The Zondo commission is set to sit for 24 months. That’s too long. A legal expert said this week he would have given Zondo three months, six at the most. That makes sense, they shouldn’t linger. A commission should do the job and get out of the way.
Rightly or wrongly, people have also become cynical of these commissions because their results or usefulness are not always apparent. Many are still smarting over the Marikana commission, whose findings or recommendations the government has yet to fully implement. The Marikana massacre itself continues to be a rod for Ramaphosa’s back. And it won’t go away or lose its potency until he faces up to it. His opponents will continue to make a feast of it.
People are just gatvol of criminality and corruption. They want to see criminals in leg-irons being frogmarched to jail. And Ramaphosa has been lazy and lethargic in sorting out the leadership issue at the NPA. He should appoint the head of the NPA pronto, and let the agency get on with the job of nailing the bastards.
In the dire situation we are in, commissions can be nice-to-haves. One inquiry that the government and the country should be paying attention to — and they are not — is the Moerane commission of inquiry into political killings in KwaZulu-Natal. It is the most important of all the inquiries because it deals with matters of life and death.
People are being butchered almost daily in townships and even small rural villages up and down the province. The country averts its eyes. It doesn’t want to know. As KwaZulu-Natal premier Willies Mchunu noted when tabling the report before the legislature last month, these killings are taking place at local government level.
And they continue unabated. Another councillor was gunned down in Umlazi, outside Durban, on Thursday night. No big deal. It’s only when high-profile politicians, such as Sindiso Magaqa, the former secretary-general of the ANC Youth League, are killed that the country takes note. Violence has almost become our way of life.
“Election as a councillor,” Mchunu told the legislature, “allows for upward mobility in financial and social status and lends itself to the creation of a patronage network.” He added that political violence was becoming “a serious threat to democracy”.
The problem for KZN is that the police and its intelligence services have been compromised. They have been found to be complicit in most of the murders, killing for one faction or the other, or simply turning a blind eye.
The Moerane report recommendations are not that startling but basic common sense that, if followed, can go a long way to curbing the violence. And they are as relevant in KZN as they should be in the rest of the country. It is mostly factional battles within the ANC and the problems can be traced to its deployment policy.
The report says there is overwhelming evidence that the tender system is the cause of the murders and urges the state to ensure the system is fair. It also calls on the state to depoliticise the civil service by enforcing the separation of powers and functions between public representatives and public officials. The practice of deploying to government positions political activists who often don’t have appropriate qualifications should be discouraged and eliminated.
There’s a low-level civil war in parts of KZN and this report shouldn’t be on Mchunu’s desk. It belongs in Ramaphosa’s in-tray. To say KZN is the region where he is least popular is almost an understatement. He’s reviled by some in his own party. Taking a personal interest in the violence scarring the province is not only the right thing to do, it will do his political prospects a power of good.