Predator politics prevails

Corruption seems a relatively benign crime. When everyone is the victim – as is the case with state looting – no one is the victim. Sure, we know that we are in theory each made incrementally poorer with every act of illegal enrichment perpetrated by a crooked officialdom and the political elite.

But at least, we rationalise, this is not the abrupt violence of a knife to the throat in a back alley, the gut-churning horror of waking at 3am to realise that despite one’s best precautions, there is a gun to one’s head. With state corruption, the individual’s loss is apparently minute and extracted with stealth over a long time. It is possible to shrug it all off as an annoyance, as one of the reality taxes of living in Africa.

The critical point is when the state moves from being the victim to being the perpetrator. The tipping point is when the state forsakes its primary purpose, the protection of its citizens, instead to target. We know that perversion from next door in Zimbabwe. It’s when the state seizes the property of its people without recompense or due process.

It’s when its bureaucracy uses the structures of governance to serve not the nation but the ruling party and the politically connected. It’s when the police plunder and the military murder, not as erratic aberrations, but in response to orders from the politicians. That’s Zimbabwe.

It’s also SA, as a new book by journalist Rehana Rossouw, appropriately entitled Predator Politics, chillingly shows. Although Rossouw’s corroboratory evidence is as painstakingly and mind-numblingly detailed as the journalistic defence against litigation demands it must be, it’s the focus on the state’s harassment and abuse of an individual and his family that makes the book important.

It’s only when we comprehend what the effects of corruption and government are at the sharp end, that of the ordinary citizen, that it truly dawns that government malfeasance is anything but a victimless crime.

It’s a tale of the trials and tribulations of one man, Fred Daniel, and his family, at the hands of predatory politicians, the scariest and most sinister of whom is Deputy President David Mabuza, the man who is a heartbeat away from being the next president.

It’s a saga that stretches over 15 years and continues to this day, despite Daniel having won 22 consecutive court cases against the state and its agents, as a corrupt government-funded and supported mafia tries to grab his Mpumalanga game reserve.

Rossouw provides abundant evidence that there are many other landowners and business people who are suffering a similar fate. Nor is it about relatively privileged individuals. Entire communities are being further impoverished by a land redistribution process that the government knows is immoral, corrupt and exists not to ensure restitution but to enrich an ANC elite.

There are some searing words from Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu: “The looting at state-owned entities, in government departments, intelligence, everywhere – from the president, from the ANC, from the top six officials and the national executive committee of the ANC – all of this is permitted and sometimes encouraged by them … what we now need to recognise is that we are busy finishing off this country.”

There are also some poignant words from Fred Daniel: “All I wanted was for civil servants to do their jobs. To do what it says in the constitution.” Us, too, Fred. Us, too.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

• Rehana Rossouw’s Predator Politics: Mabuza, Fred Daniel and the Great Land Scam is published by Jacana Media.

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