The winner in this battle must be the poor

IN THE light of the outcome of the past meeting of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC), it is safe to predict that President Jacob Zuma will continue to win every internal battle in the run-up to the party’s elective conference in December.

Despite this, the Ramaphosa/Gordhan group is still likely to win the war around state capture, which has become the defining issue of both the ANC’s factional fights and South African politics as a whole.

The victory of the Ramaphosa/Gordhan group carries different risks for the poor and the working class than that of the Zuma group.

The danger of the Zuma group is clear. Their victory could institutionalise anti-poor corruption and undermine the recourse built into the current system. This is the political basis for movements of the poor to call for Zuma to go.

Victory for the Ramaphosa/Gordhan group poses a threat that the neo-liberal system and white monopoly capital get a renewed legitimacy and state capture is defined as a problem when it affects capitalist and state elites, while corruption affecting the poor is normalised.

A recent City Press article illustrates this. Titled “Workers earn peanuts, contractors make millions in fence projects”, the article explains how businesses contracted by the Limpopo department of agriculture to put up fences raked in millions of rands through charging clearly inflated prices, according to the DA in the province. Workers in the projects were paid between R75 and R92 per day.

In this story, it is the workers who are directly disadvantaged, so it does not feature prominently in the state capture conservations constructed by the Ramaphosa/Gordhan group.

For them the tone was set by the State of Capture report, where the disadvantaged “person” was the mega-rich corporation Glencore.

The reason the Guptas are so hated by this group is because they want to displace corporations like Glencore as the foremost exploiters of the black working class in the mining-energy-financial complex.

The Ramaphosa/Gordhan group is part of a broad front defending the legitimacy of white monopoly capital by denying its existence, while at the same time defining state capture and corruption as a crisis when it affects this group.

The Zuma group has pushed back hard against this denial of the existence of white monopoly capital. But they are unable, beyond hollow denials, to do the same when it comes to state capture.

They are certainly unable to lead a struggle for a redefinition of state capture that puts, at the centre, workers who sweat in the sun all day for R75 while their bosses make millions.

The reason for this is simply that they are implicated in this kind of anti-poor state capture, which they are doing in close collaboration with white monopoly capital, as the social grants crisis demonstrated.

They are forced to sidestep the issue of state capture and put forward a vague call for radical economic transformation.

Malusi Gigaba’s stint so far as finance minister illustrates what happens to a radical economic transformation agenda when it is led by a group of black capitalists and state officials deeply involved in the exploitation of the poor.

Radical economic transformation quickly becomes “no change in policy” as the global capitalist elites remind the Zuma group that their wealth depends on the same neo-liberal system responsible for the fantastic growth in wealth of white monopoly capital.

The true parameter of the battle is set as about the size of the pay-off white monopoly capitalists must advance for their renewed legitimacy.

The most likely scenario is that the pay-off will be made and the neo-liberal system in service of white monopoly capitalists and their black junior partners will receive a renewed legitimacy through the mechanism of an imposed definition of state capture that looks after the interests of big capitalists.

Only a concerted effort by the movements of the poor and the working class can avoid this scenario by mobilising a battle to define state capture and corruption in the national consciousness in ways that prioritise the interests of the poor and push back against both dominant factions in the ANC.

The battle is to change the way the struggle against state capture is understood – from a struggle in defence of Glencore and other businesses “unfairly” denied state contracts, to a struggle in defence of the exploited fencing workers in Limpopo denied decent working conditions and living wages.

The ANC are forced to sidestep the issue of state capture

Ronald Wesso is Research Head at Oxfam South Africa