Clean government may have to be sought beyond this irreparably dirty ANC

To the plagues of Covid-19 and gender-based violence afflicting SA one must add corruption to complete an insidious trinity that threatens to torpedo SA’s democratic experiment. The Gauteng personal protective equipment scandal has again exposed, even in the post-state capture era, the networks of patronage and privilege and their parasitic relationships with state entities, be they government departments, state-owned companies or local councils and metros. Sadly, corruption has become a way of life in SA, with surveys and repeated (yet largely ignored) reports by the auditor-general exposing the deep-rootedness of graft at all levels, and in a wide range of public institutions. Huge corporate scandals like that of the Steinhoff group illustrate that corruption is endemic, too, in the private sector, and that your hard-earned investor rands are as much at risk on the JSE (with all its fancy controls) as they are in a leaky vault at a VBS Mutual Bank branch in rural Limpopo.

That corruption has become endemic in no way absolves the ANC for the part it has played it entrenching it as a permanent and debilitating feature of our public life. Far from being excused as just another corrupt body in a gloomy firmament of kleptocracy and institutional theft, the ANC’s historic mission is to carry the torch of freedom and a better future for all. That is the promise it made to the people of SA. That is the promise that is broken rand by rand in every tender handed to a crony and every public project whose main purpose is to enlarge the circle of those blessed by the shower of stolen largesse. Every rand stolen is stolen not from an amorphous entity called the state, but from the people of SA.

It’s become commonplace to express one’s disappointment in the leadership of President Cyril

Ramaphosa, and the cleanup we expected given the

‘‘nine wasted years” narrative and promised clean break from the administration of former president Jacob Zuma.

What’s especially disconcerting, though, is the extent to which the carefully assembled checks and balances meant to ensure clean government appear to work in favour of the thieves. Everyone seems to be in on the game. Not only are there seldom successful convictions or even court cases, the culprit is often ‘‘redeployed” by the ANC to another public entity, where the pattern is repeated.

It’s most unfortunate that SA’s history of deprivation appears to have found its antidote in the high-living tastes of ANC members. And it’s beyond obscene that a party that claims to take its mandate from the poor should have in its ranks leaders who seem near-obsessed with conspicuous consumption, be it cars, houses, parties or clothes. Service appears to be an afterthought. The working poor dutifully return these mascots of excess to office every five years, apparently seeing no link between their own wretched living conditions and the obscene luxury our leaders insist is their birthright.

At the heart of the corruption pandemic is an ANC that has abandoned its mission and whose leaders are so compromised by the pursuit of illicit wealth that no-one dares call out the other for fear of being exposed themselves. The focus on state capture, while correct and necessary in itself, has merely deflected attention from the networks of patronage that endure and thrive out of the Zondo spotlight.

Frozen in the headlights of bad publicity and looming accountability, the ANC falls back on what it does best, talk and promises. Speakers at the funeral of stalwart Andrew Mlangeni, among them former president Thabo Mbeki, repeated the oft-made call for renewal in the party. But this call has been made before, to little effect. To those who had clung to the hope of generational renewal, the involvement of the sons and daughters of top ANC figures in gouging the public purse is disappointing. The ANC harbours the illusion that a little renewal will go a long way: increasingly, though, it appears that the solution to corruption lies beyond the ANC, at least in its current manifestation.

Its promise is broken, rand by rand, in every tender handed to a crony