The Guptas, Zuma, and a sinking ship
TIRED of the Guptas yet? Tired of the words “state capture”? Too bad. This has only just begun. It will end, and badly for the Guptas and possibly the ANC at that, but a lot of scales have to fall from a lot of eyes before that happens.
It won’t happen at the ANC national executive committee meeting being held near Pretoria this weekend. President Jacob Zuma has that august body neatly sewn up, even though criticism, from a minority, might get heated.
It won’t happen even if the Constitutional Court rules Zuma in breach of his oath of office for ignoring the public protector’s instructions to pay back some of the public funds used to upgrade Nkandla.
It won’t happen if the ANC does badly in the coming local government elections.
For all the hubris about collective leadership, the glue in the ANC is fear of what would happen if its leader fell.
It may happen if, in his scrap with Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, Tom Moyane is dislodged as the South African Revenue Service commissioner and replaced with someone prepared to do an audit of the Gupta ties with the state.
But that presumes they have not paid taxes that they should have. It is not an assumption we can automatically make.
And it may happen if the ANC’s traditional benefactors withhold funding in protest at the party’s remarkable capacity to tolerate the close ties between the Gupta and Zuma families.
But while we wait and watch events unfold it is important to remind ourselves of who or what we should be angry or concerned about.
I am not angry with the Guptas. I don’t for a moment buy the story of how they started off in South Africa in a garage and have through sheer hard work built a considerable business empire, but it’s important to remember that they were welcomed in this country not by Zuma but by Essop Pahad, Thabo Mbeki’s former gatekeeper. As a reward (and not from their garage) they created a magazine for Pahad to publish, which he does to this day.
I am not even angry with Zuma, though he is deeply cynical about the relationship that has grown between him and his family and the Guptas and the way he converts the votes people entrust him with into favours for them. He has no choice now but to guts it out, shifting blame as he always has.
The fact is that it is the ANC itself which has allowed a situation to arise where the Guptas feel bold enough to offer the position of finance minister to a deputy minister or to engineer a change in minerals ministers. It is the ANC itself, through its purported collective leadership, which is supposed to hold the president it alone elected to account. It should, but it doesn’t.
If you arrived in a strange country and the doors to unimaginable political influence were opened without you even having to lean on them you’d probably go through too. Hell, you’d assume this guy has just received a huge mandate to rule so the things he does must by definition be quite popular, no?
It is the 80 or so people meeting as the ruling party NEC today that I am angry with. They remind me of one of those horrible Third World ferry accidents where an avaricious captain overloads his boat which then capsizes in mid-stream. People die.
The ANC is the boat, Zuma its captain. And the NEC is the missing port authority who should have prevented the boat being overloaded in the first place.
It is not unfair to ask why all the brave ANC folk now coming forward with stories about Gupta interference, or fighting to stave off a sovereign debt rating downgrade, have not spoken up before, even if only behind the closed doors of an NEC meeting.
Perhaps they have. More likely though, they have not. We would know.
However, now that the bubble has burst, Zuma will for the rest of his time in office labour under the cloud Mcebisi Jonas has created for him when he admitted that the Guptas had offered him Nhlanhla Nene’s old job, before Nene was axed.
The Guptas deny it and are trying to paint Jonas as the architect of a plot to get rid of the president. But, in effect, Jonas has accused them of committing an offence under South Africa’s corruption laws. They should sue him for libel and take the fight to a court where the truth can unfold.