Part three of the State capture report, a little too complicated for Zondo

Another Zondo report. Yawn. Not because it’s not important.

On the contrary, it’s critical to SA’s slow escape from the primaeval slime that a decade of state capture has dumped us in. But it’s a yawn because we all know that the moment that Acting Chief Justice Raymond Zondo handed over yet another damning indictment of the governing party shenanigans to the president, it became irrelevant.

In a flash, it transmogrified from Zondo blockbuster to Ramaphosa block-blustering – just another report that Cyril Ramaphosa will ignore. The list of ANC leaders implicated in state capture continues to expand. Former ministers Malusi Gigaba and Lynne Brown, as well as two serving Cabinet members, Communications and Digital Technologies Minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, and catch-of-the-day Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe are named.

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They join the dozens named in Zondo part one. And at the centre of it all, like a malevolent spider, former president Jacob Zuma. Since the Zondo reports have, so far, made not a single mention of Ramaphosa in the pillage of the country, but it is easy to forget that he sat at the Chief Spider’s side during the four worst years of state capture.

It is then with irony, but no apparent embarrassment, that Ramaphosa again this week hailed the report as a “significant step in ridding the country of corruption”. The National Prosecuting Authority appears to be gridlocked.

After three years in the job, director Shamila Batohi’s excuses are threadbare. And a simple example illustrates the hopelessly compromised nature of Ramaphosa’s “necessary steps”. In any democracy worthy of its name, Ntshavheni and Mantashe would have resigned upon being fingered. The findings against Mantashe are particularly serious.

The former ANC secretary-general is implicated in the capture of the Transnet board in order to loot the R300 billion locomotive procurement fund. Mantashe seems serenely unperturbed, confident of his indispensability to Ramaphosa’s political survival. The Zondo report, he says, shouldn’t be used to settle party scores, but rather be used “to correct mistakes” and to rebuild the ANC.

To this end, the ANC has appointed a “task team”. Expect delay and prevarication as the president tries to ride out the months to the ANC’s December conference that will either confirm him for a second term or recall him. But is the third Zondo report, to be released by the end of February, that most matters.

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This has the potential to be explosive in its effects on the ANC’s policy of cadre deployment, as well as on the credibility of Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa pleaded with Zondo not to find that cadre deployment should be scrapped,
portraying it as a benign consultative body. The deployment minutes for the past three years, released following the dogged efforts of the DA, show that to be a lie.

If Zondo finds Ramaphosa’s memory lapse explanations as implausible and lacking in credibility as he did Mantashe’s, the president’s stature and prospects will take a hefty blow.

Of course, if Zondo does so, he can kiss goodbye any chance he might have of being appointed to the position he so richly deserves, that of chief justice.