The ANC factional selling point is a tad less appealing than the old “better life for all”. It comes down to: “Our crooks are better than their crooks.”
No one I speak to wants any kind of crooks in government. Do you?
Look at the consequences of wholesale theft in the public sector, including state-owned enterprises. Endless blackouts (politely called getting loadshat). No water. Sewage running down streets and even into homes. Trash everywhere. No jobs.
Let’s focus for a moment on no jobs.
It is no secret that South Africa is subject to a massive investment strike. Not only has incoming capital flow dried up but there is capital flight and a lack of internal investment. Who would invest big money in job-creating initiatives when there is no guarantee that essential services will work or that promised infrastructure will ever materialise?
Where I live in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) is a microcosm. We have massive, enduring unemployment. Despite being a potential development hub, with a top research-intensive university, National Arts Festival and other big events that bring in outside money, and many other starting points, employment is shrinking not growing. Despite hundreds of millions spent on water infrastructure, the water situation keeps getting worse. I have previously written about how patronage networks benefit from failure but we have yet to see a political movement that seriously plans to take this on.
So let’s give it a try.
The starting point is a very simple slogan: “lock them up!”
This sounds potentially authoritarian (if not a bit Trumpy). So let’s make it real. And be clear that it not only fits a democratic order but is essential for one.
We already have a clue from the Criminal Matters Amendment Act 2015 definition of ‘‘essential infrastructure’’ as “any installation, structure, facility or system, whether publicly or privately owned, the loss or damage of, or the tampering with, which may interfere with the provision or distribution of a basic service to the public”. The Act provides for a sentence of up to 30 years in jail and a fine for corporate entities of up to R100-million rand.
That is a great starting point.
We need two additions. First, the principle must be extended to all theft of public resources in any state or state-owned entity. Second, prosecutions and convictions should be expeditious, rather than the snail’s pace we see today.
The first part is relatively easy – though legislating is not instant, the usual inclusive processes and checks for constitutionality need to be followed. The second part is more of a challenge.
What are the obstacles to expeditious prosecution and conviction? Collecting evidence can be difficult especially if insiders are involved who can erase paper trails and use threats and menaces to silence whistleblowers. That points to a need to reform police intelligence to ensure that it is well-resourced and operates according to best practices to ensure that actionable evidence is collected.
Another critical resource is prosecutors with the knowledge and resources to handle cases that could have complicated financial aspects. Finally: the court system is already clogged. Creating special corruption courts to handle such cases expeditiously would make a big difference.
Putting all these measures in place would have to be followed by clear intent to take them seriously.
We already have a lot of laws on the books that should in theory make a difference. Section 32 of the Municipal Finance Management Act allows fruitless, wasteful and irregular expenditures to be recovered from senior officials and political leaders. The Public Audit Amendment Act of 2018 empowers the Auditor General to recover such costs. However, the process for this is ponderous and only kicks in after discovery by the AG, which could be up to a year after the event. And that is just the start of a lengthy process.
These laws however do not have the sort of teeth to seriously dampen wrongdoing. With amounts in the hundreds of millions and even billions going astray, the vague threat of some of it being recovered a year or more after the event is not going to stop anyone – as is clearly the case.
But think of the wins from these relatively modest legislative changes and new costs to the state.
We won’t need a harsh IMF intervention or unpleasant policies like austerity. We won’t need to tamper with hard-won workplace rights or trash our environment, or any of those unpleasant nostrums for neoliberal economics. All we will need to do is be serious about rooting out the rot and the investment strike will stop. What’s more, ordinary people who can’t afford to pay for their own services will start to see real differences in their lives.
Once we have all this straight, we can have proper debates about the best way to reduce inequality, create economic opportunity, employment equity, land reform and so on. But if we do not decriminalise the state and SoEs, it really doesn’t matter. Economic activity will collapse and we will end up with a nasty IMF intervention or worse.
We can finally make the brilliant promise of our best-in-the-world constitution real. So no, this is not a call for authoritarianism: just the opposite.
Aside from the ANC’s fratricidal conflict, we have mostly aimless opposition, taking up side issues like attacking foreigners and nitpicking details of their opponents’ track records.
None of that matters if we have a hollowed-out state, the main purpose of which is to divert wealth into the pockets of a small elite.
If no one else gets this right, someone should start a LockThemUp Party.
Philip Machanick is an associate professor of computer science at Rhodes University.
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