How can Zondo get ‘irredeemably rotten’ parliament to grow a spine?

Raymond Zondo is making important use of the two years of political impunity and public stature afforded him by the office of Chief Justice, before he retires in 2024.

Last week, speaking at News24’s On the Record Summit, Zondo tried to pressure the government over its attempts to smother in treacle the findings of his Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. He said the ANC was an incorrigible bunch of crooks and that parliament lacked the balls to do anything but roll over and wag its tail if state capture reared its avaricious head again. Well, that’s the nub.

Being a judicious man, Zondo phrased it more politely than that. Zondo said one of the key questions arising from his mammoth inquiry was why parliament had never properly exercised its constitutional task of oversight and put an end to state capture when it was first exposed. He then answered his rhetorical question: “[It] did not stop it because the majority party didn’t want to stop it.”

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Zondo said he doubted that ANC MPs would act any differently if the same thing happened again. These are “very difficult” matters that must be addressed, he warned.

Parliament, predictably, is acting all hurt. The leaders of the National Assembly and the National Council of Provinces are to meet Zondo to explain that they’re all good to go, as soon as President Cyril Ramaphosa draws up his “action plan” to address the findings of the commission.

Meanwhile, “further analysis is being undertaken internally” to work out what parliament should do. The short answer, of course, would be to grow a spine. But that’s not going to happen overnight in an amoeba, which is what parliament has shown itself to be over the past 26 years of unrestrained thieving.

It should not be forgotten that the Zondo commission’s terms of reference restricted its investigations to the Zuma years. But while Zuma was the most unabashedly blatant of the ANC presidents who have enabled state capture, he was neither the first nor the last.

Before 2009, Thabo Mbeki set the train in motion when he helped thwart the exposure of his ANC’s colleagues’ corrupt involvement in the 1999 arms deal, which cost SA R142 billion by the time it was paid for in 2020.

And Ramaphosa, for all his strenuous breathing of mock effort and exclamations of shock and horror, also has been complicit. Looking the other way makes good presidential sense.

In a party where there is virtually no minister who has not been implicated in some kind of malfeasance, political corruption can at best be managed, not eradicated, if the president is to survive. As a result, the scale of SA’s unravelling has been breathtaking.

Every single thread of the country’s infrastructural tapestry, laboriously laid down over centuries, has been shredded and frayed to snapping point. Credible estimates put the cost of looting during Zuma’s second presidential term – between 2014 and 2019 – at around R1.5 trillion. To give it some context, that’s well over 80% of the 2019 budget.

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At every step, parliament covered its ears. So, too, did Ramaphosa. As the president tried to convince the Zondo commission when giving evidence as head of state, despite the media exposes and whistle-blower revelations, the ANC was unaware of what was going on.

There were “lapses”, “errors” and “system failures”, but not a single name attached to a single person. The ANC is irredeemably rotten. And while it dominates parliament, the oversight branch of our democracy will also be rotten.