SA is cleansing a dark soul – scourge of organised looting

Things have been moving fast last week to expose the myth of Zuma. The battle has been waged and mopping-up operations are now underway. KwaZulu-Natal has been gutted, with the supply chain laid waste – and now the hangover brings a dawning new reality.

The second week in July 2021 will forever be etched into the history books as the pivotal moment when SA was taken to the brink, but also pulled back. That pivotal moment was refreshing, because for once it was not a racial divide, or even a class divide: at the core was the single question about the Rule of Law.

It has been about those that believe in, and support, the Rule of Law versus those who do not. But at another level, it was also about cleansing the country of the scourge of organised looting, initially started as the plunder of state coffers by untouchable cadres, but now mirrored by their grassroots constituency that has been denied their time to feed at the trough.

At another level, it has been like the reality TV programme Survivor, because a hidden immunity idol has suddenly been found, and the dynamics of the game have changed fundamentally. The first, and major development, has been the new division of society over non-traditional lines, by bringing into focus the Rule of Law.

This has been festering for almost three decades now, as the growing frustration has been felt by society at large, as they have witnessed the systematic looting of the fiscus by the political elite. In essence, the ANC has been transformed from a visionary movement based on deep principles with a clear philosophical logic that was broadly accepted by significant players, internationally and locally, into a sophisticated criminal syndicate capable of looting more than one-quarter of the GDP of the country, and then laundering that quantum of cash into US dollars, to be stashed in so-called safe havens offshore.

This is a sad reality.

One need look no further than the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) expressed as a percentage of GDP. There is a direct correlation between FDI flow and the Rule of Law. We see confirmation of this when suddenly the healthy positive in-flow of FDI was reversed at the time of Marikana. Coinciding with that time was the emergence of the Economic Freedom Fighters as a factor, but also the consolidation of the Zuma faction of looters within the upper echelons of the ANC.

Thundering in the background was the arms deal, with litigation focused on Zuma and his enablers, leading to the first legal judgment implicating him when in 2005, Schabir Shaik was sentenced to 15 years in jail. In his judgment, Hilary Squires ruled “all the accused companies were used at one time or another to pay sums of money to Jacob Zuma”.

By implication, therefore, Zuma was directly involved in corruption, racketeering, fraud and money laundering. The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) consequently charged him in December of 2007, citing the ARMED AND DANGEROUS. Community members hold weapons as they stand at a roadblock in Phoenix, north of Durban, to prevent looters from reaching the community.

Armed community members and vigilante groups have stepped in to tackle unrest in South Africa, taking matters into their own hands and sometimes stoking violence as security forces struggle to restore order. Understaffed and heavily reliant on private security companies, the police was rapidly over-whelmed when riots and looting first flared last week in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), sparked by the jailing of graft-accused former president Jacob Zuma.

Thousands of soldiers were deployed to provide reinforcements as the violence spread to Johannesburg, SA’s financial hub. But with tensions still high in parts of KZN and a toll of over 100, some worried citizens have taken up arms to protect their communities and their property. Such grassroot mobilisations can easily turn violent and deadly in a country where it is not uncommon to own a handgun.

AFP journalists witnessed one particularly brutal incident when dozens of local minibus operators beat up seven town-ship dwellers caught rummaging through the debris of a ransacked mall in Johannesburg. The victims, which included two women, crouched helplessly against a metal gate, wide-eyed Concern as South Africans take up arms against looters and screaming in pain as the mob clamped down on them with whips, sticks and metal rods.

One man who tried to escape was hit over the head with a glass bottle and dragged back, blood streaming down his neck. Eager to show off their prowess, the group proudly paraded to police vans parked outside the mall’s main entrance. There, they handed in their captives, whose faces were swollen and their hands tied tightly behind their backs. Some were released on the spot. Residents had meanwhile gathered in a nearby cemetery around the body of a teenage boy, allegedly shot earlier in the day.

Squires judgment. It is this initial charge by the NPA that lies at the very heart of what has been playing out over the last week. Zuma could only insulate himself from jail by becoming president, and therefore controlling the appointments to the NPA, judiciary, the SA Secret Service and National Intelligence Agency.

Once in power, Zuma purged the upper echelons of the civil service, replacing key cadres with sycophants, rewarding them by giving them access to patronage flows, derived from the systematic looting of the fiscus. The Zuma presidency will probably be referred to by historians as the missing years of state capture.

To capture the state – now an established fact by the Zondo Commission – Zuma also had to capture the ANC. State capture was the outcome, but the capture of the ANC was the vehicle needed to deliver that outcome. Therefore, central to this is the Rule of Law. The ANC leadership now has a binary choice.

If they adopt the Rule of Law, their dilemma is how to deal with the Zuma sycophants? How do they deal with the State Security Agency, if they are implicated in sedition and an attempted coup and money laundering? By doing the right thing and realigning with the Rule of Law, the ANC will purge itself of the criminal element that now controls it, so it will emerge smaller, but invigorated and still relevant.

Conversely, if it falters in this process, it will continue to haemorrhage legitimacy and simply become irrelevant over time. This is a truly transformative moment, for it has changed the discourse away from the corrosive politics of race and class, to an inclusive new discourse about the position of each citizen vis-à-vis the Rule of Law.

This is a pivotal moment, making the violence of the last week a purging of the dark soul of the country, enabling our democracy to be deepened and our stalled nation-building exercise to be revitalised.

Turton is a professor at the University of the Free State’s centre for Environmental Management, specialising in water resource management