PROGRESSIVE BUSINESS Doing dirty work for dirty companies is not inevitable
In a way, we can’t blame the Guptas for doing what comes naturally to them. Thugs will be thugs. Looters gonna loot. But while, rightly, the nation has been hating on the Gupta family, the conversation becomes more interesting after their moral bankruptcy is taken as read. Looters gonna loot, but only if they are enabled.
As concerned citizens try to avert the collapse of SA’s formal economy, it’s not the Guptas that grate the most. It’s the complicity of ordinary people and companies. Not just outsize pantomime villains like Bell Pottinger, but regular companies that do business back in the regular economy.
So, here’s a special shoutout to McKinsey and KPMG for the audacity of their denials that they were complicit. Nobody important knew what was going on. Rogue employees did all that, those rascals.
The company is also shocked that its crooked clients have been engaging in crooked behaviour. After a few years, that kind of thing just won’t be tolerated.
Let’s hand out the Thanks for Everything, No Really, Thanks, Award. It was presumably a cold morning in London when Bell Pottinger held open the door for Duduzane Zuma in January 2016, which now feels like a more innocent time.
Bell Pottinger and Duduzane presumably drank tea, safely ensconced in a city where white monopoly capital has never been discouraged from roaming free across the world.
To be clear, Duduzane did not float into London as a fêted humanitarian and all-round darling. Bell Pottinger would have done its homework. The Waterkloof landing was in April 2013. The link between the Guptas and the Zumas was well established.
The e-mails hadn’t leaked yet, but millions of South Africans knew what was happening. Bell Pottinger knew and didn’t mind one bit. It agreed to try to destroy a nation, for a fee.
There was probably a good reason the Guptas chose Bell Pottinger. They must have sensed an ideological kinship: the notion that money matters more than morality. Bell Pottinger may have fired the Guptas, but this was a singular outbreak of virtue. It never found reason to ditch as a client Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian dictator Bashar.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko was retained as a client, as were the authoritarian governments of Bahrain and Egypt.
Yet South Africans are asked to buy an apology from professional liars — people who have shown nothing but contempt for the nation.
Why apologise this time? Because the Guptas, for all their faults, are more odious than Lukashenko and the Assads? Or maybe because Bell Pottinger forgot that SA is still a democracy, despite its trying to damage that arrangement.
South Africans get to speak up. We are luckier than our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Belarus.
Bell Pottinger make colourful villains and a pox on all their houses. Liars gonna lie.
What about KPMG? What about McKinsey? Those guys weren’t pariahs in the business world. They were regular companies that took meetings with Gupta Inc. They left the meetings with the warm sense of commercial success. Wheels were set in motion.
Every company that is now being caught out is trying to contain the blaze of indignation to one business unit, one person, one partner, some rogue executives and a careless cleaner.
This would never be necessary if businesses shunned crooks from the start. Oakbay wasn’t always without an auditor, a sponsor and a listing on the JSE. It relied on the complicity of companies to build its shady empire.
If KPMG acted honourably from the start, we wouldn’t be writing snide articles about it. It could have said no. But money talked and that’s all KPMG heard.
Choose your clients wisely. It doesn’t matter if someone has not yet been proved to be crooked. If you think a client is less than honourable, say no to their money.
I’ve been an ad man my whole adult life. I love my industry, but we are also complicit. We take clients’ money and we don’t stop to ask if we’re doing good.
We make much-loved ads asking people to buy a new car they don’t need and can’t afford. We convince people without money that it would be a good idea to borrow some. We write flattering copy about oil firms and, back in the day, the wealth to be made through contracts for difference.
We do the best work for firms that only make the world worse. Not our problem. We’re just advertising practitioners, you know. We just do our jobs. And so our excuse is as good as Bell Pottinger’s.
You can’t change an industry, but you can change your own agency. My advertising agency became a progressive one in 2017. We fired our nonprogressive clients and retained only those who share our goal of a more progressive world. If we’re going to sell your product, we need to accept responsibility for the product’s consequences.
It’s easy to become Bell Pottinger or KPMG or McKinsey — one great meeting, one small lapse of judgment and then, like a small-town crook in Fargo, you’re in over your head and doomed. But it’s also easy not to become Bell Pottinger, KPMG or McKinsey.
Don’t do business with bad companies. Shun the amoral ones as much as the immoral.
Getting into bed with the devil will never end well. It may be glorious for a while, but sooner or later, a Gupta brother will come round to screw you on impossibly crisp white sheets. Don’t pretend you didn’t know. Thugs will be thugs.
THE AD INDUSTRY IS ALSO COMPLICIT. WE TAKE CLIENTS’ MONEY AND WE DON’T STOP TO ASK IF WE’RE DOING GOOD