State capture now laid bare

SOUTH Africans have been focusing on a single story for most of the past four or five days. The bookends of the story are the departure of Jacob Zuma and the arrival of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of South Africa.

There certainly is reason for optimism over Ramaphosa’s election as president and over the deliberative interventions he has scheduled for the coming months, but we would be well advised to wait and see.

The story captured between the bookends of departure and arrival is complex.

It tells tales of an octopus-like creature that spread its tentacle across state and society.

Its octopal reach has ensured that many people made a lot of money and that they also made the laws that secured their access to vast sums of money.

These laws presented many people with rather flimsy veneers of legality.

The standout feature of this “legality” was just how sincere Zuma was about his own insincerity, with the words: “What have I done wrong?”

It is important to remember that the cronyism and corruption associated with the Zuma years lasted for about a decade – from his noxious victory at Polokwane in 2007 to the election of Ramaphosa to the presidency of the ruling party in December last year.

This means that Zuma has taken almost half of our democracy, and lined the pockets of his retinue, friends and his family.

We should probably throw in the word “allegedly” somewhere.

During this period, the octopal tentacles reached wherever they could and along with sucking out as much money as possible, they also hollowed out the ethical core of the state.

Zuma’s sincerity, facile as it was, reminded me of a comment made by one of those odious former policemen of the old apartheid state (he, like many others, currently enjoys legitimacy by the shadow plays of “tolerance”, “diversity” and “reconciliation”) in defending the ways in which cronyism, abuse of systems and the shoring up of privilege operated, said: “It was all done legally”.

Back to the future. As the dragnet expands, and the list of people implicated in corruption and cronyism grows, shredders will be heating up, a lot of cash will be ferreted away and villains will disappear into the wind.

Among the accused, and those suspected of corruption, will be high-level office bearers and lower-level officials.

Zuma and the Gupta family are the highest profile names in the political economic hurricane that is approaching our shores, but across the state and civil society there are lesserknown people who have benefited directly from corruption.

We can be sure they will be exposed and hopefully face the full force of the law.

Some have enjoyed carte blanche to run little fiefdoms and satrapies that thrived on proximal power, with mere rhetorical nods to distal power, the power that is far-sighted, more holistic and that sits in places far away.

In other words, you make money where and when you can, never mind the greater good, or how little crimes and oversights contribute to greater breakdown.

As Ramaphosa said in the Sona: “This is the year in which we will turn the tide of corruption in our public institutions . . . We must fight corruption, fraud and collusion in the private sector with the same purpose and intensity . . .

“This requires that we strengthen law enforcement institutions and that we shield them from external interference or manipulation. We will urgently attend to the leadership issues at the National Prosecuting Authority to ensure that this critical institution is stabilised and able to perform its mandate unhindered.” This, as far as we can tell, is the official story. We should probably not get ahead of ourselves.

There is, nonetheless, evidence that the criminal enterprise that grew during the Zuma years has formed what British historian John Dickie, of University College of London, described as a “partnership, in the name of the law” – a reference to the way that mafia groups had taken over the state in parts of Italy.

Using the analogy of a “parasitical creeper” Dickie found that one particular group in the south of Italy had “wound itself so thoroughly around the branches of the state that it now formed a more solid structure than the tree off which it fed”. We cannot be sure that this is precisely what has happened in South Africa, but we may speculate.

One nagging concern I have draws on an observation by Leoluca Orlando, a former mayor of Palermo, Sicily.

Drawing parallels between organised crime in Italy and post-Soviet Russia, Orlando said: “Russian gangsters will allow the state to combat organised crime only once they are very, very rich.”

Perhaps we have reached a point where some people have become wealthy enough to become honest and sincere.

Whatever the case may be, as the Afrikaans saying goes, nou gaan die poppe dans.