The more things change, the more graft stays the same
For people in power some inclinations twirl around like a carousel. My new year reading concerns a rural president illequipped to oversee a modern economy, whose rackety administration was riddled with corruption.
The sleaze in the republic being so pervasive, the commissioner of police even published an open letter, admitting, “the rottenness of the entire police force”, but which, he lamented, he was unable to reform because of lack of support.
This is not President Jacob Zuma, the capo of modern South African vice, but president Paul Kruger at the tail end of the 19th century.
Historian Charles van Onselen, in his riveting new book, observes, “as in most systems characterised by disparities in power and wealth, the classic shortcircuiting mechanism was corruption. In developed economies such as the US, where wealth is relatively well-entrenched within certain sectors, money is often used to acquire high political office.
“In underdeveloped or persistently weak economies, where money is harder to come by, as in parts of Africa, it is high office and the selling of favours that are most often used to acquire wealth.”
In his book The Cowboy Capitalist, Van Onselen records that Kruger saw little wrong with politicians accepting “gifts” in return for business concessions (that is, bribes). Zuma appears to think that such graft is his personal due.
Van Onselen adds that prior to the Anglo-Boer War, there was a “gradual erosion of the gerontocratic, patriarchal, near feudaldominance and style exercised by president Kruger and his cohort”.
Opposition was led by younger, better educated Afrikaners. Today, this is again our hope as Zuma’s venality has finally driven him into a cul-de-sac.
The mental universe of the narcissistic leader knows no colour barriers. In 1960, the then South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd proclaimed, “I never have the nagging doubt of wondering whether I am wrong.”
This could easily be a tweet from US President Donald Trump, his finger poised on the nuclear button.
Zuma also seems untroubled by doubt, merely driven by low political calculation and high greed.
Confronted with detailed evidence of corruption, Zuma pretends that he has no idea what people are talking about.
The Sunday Times recently published a snippet from 25 years ago about Stoffel van der Merwe, the retiring secretary-general of the National Party.
“His refusal to accept that anybody in government was accountable for the unbelievable levels of corruption and waste in public funds has finally driven home the realisation: nobody actually governs SA, some people merely have the privilege of looting it,” the paper reminded its readers
But wait. Some things do change, even if it’s only a matter of consistently held principles in radically changed circumstances.
When I left SA in 1970 and arrived broke in England, I approached the London editor of a large South African newspaper group with some ideas for articles. My first suggestion was that as Peter Hain, then organising sports boycotts, seemed to be the most hated man in SA, it would be a newsworthy twist to have a rounded profile and an interview with him to balance the vitriol published back home.
“No thank you,” said the editor, a kindly old buffer.
“I think we’ve heard quite enough of that young man!”
PRESIDENT PAUL KRUGER SAW LITTLE WRONG WITH POLITICIANS ACCEPTING ‘GIFTS’ IN RETURN FOR BUSINESS CONCESSIONS
Instead he commissioned my second pitch: to interview an 80-year-old South African who spoke from his soap box every Sunday at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.
After a lifetime of adventure, he had had every millimetre of his body — including his face — covered with tattoos, and had “presold” his entire skin to a taxidermist for a respectable sum. That old fella will be long dead, though he may live on if a taxidermist’s display case still exhibits his bizarrely tattooed skin (“Yup, every inch,” he boasted when I indelicately pressed him).
But 48 years later, Hain remains consistent, despite our dramatic change in regimes. He has been instrumental in initiating a British inquiry into possible money laundering by Zuma and his paymasters while our prosecutors and police cravenly look the other way.
The dedication for Van Onselen’s book reads: “For those in search of history without borders.”
He reveals that the run-up to the Anglo-Boer war was not merely a WhitehallPretoria spat, as hitherto assumed, but involved considerable intrigue on the part of the many highly paid US engineers working on the Rand.
Today, Hain again shows that our rather parochial sense of South African exceptionalism is susceptible to winds, and principles, without borders.