The costs of the ANC’s decision far outweigh the benefits

In October last year, former national chairperson of the ANC, Baleka Mbete, wrestled with Al Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan on the latter’s Head to Head programme at the Oxford Union debating society in the United Kingdom.

It was, to say the least, a harrowing 49 minutes. Pressed to explain her’s and the ANC’s posture to a fellow comrade who returned to jail for a less noble deed after 1994, Mbete ventured a remark she should rather have steered clear of: “In the ANC political life,” she mused, “we look at things sometimes not exactly the way other people see them.”

Fast forward to July 2020, the national leadership of the ANC has taken yet another decision on grounds of a logic with which many are struggling to decipher good political sense.

While the nation was still digesting the arrest of the eight accused executives and board members of the VBS Mutual Bank, the ANC lifted its suspension of two of its Limpopo leaders, le and Danny Msiza, provincial deputy chairperson and treasurer respectively. Both were suspended from their party positions after featuring unpalatably in Advocate Terry Motau’s October 2018 report to the Reserve Bank’s Prudential Authority.

Also, in March last year, the provincial treasury commissioned an investigation by BDO PS Advisory, on illegal deposits into the VBS by 12 municipalities in the province. The BDO report named the officials who caused the deposits and recommended corrective steps, including civil recovery against them.

It found that “Radzilani failed to comply with section 52 of the MFMA [Municipal Finance Management Act] in that she failed to monitor and oversee the exercise of responsibilities assigned in terms of MFMA to the AO [accounting officer] and the CFO [chief financial officer] to the extent provided in the MFMA”.

As with other implicated officials, the report recommended that “corrective action be considered against … Radzilani” and that “steps providing for civil recovery [in line with the MFMA] be considered against the municipal officials” identified.

Far from demonstrating a commitment to the Wretched of the Earth and the prudent use of public resources, the ANC betrays the leadership’s schizophrenic stance on corruption. All too often, they say one thing while doing the other.

Similarly, silence by the individual municipalities, the provincial treasury or even the ANC on the implementation of the BDO recommendations makes it most likely that the report was filed in the garbage heap. And then we will one day wake up to shrilled voices of some racist entity, demanding the private prosecution of the implicated individuals. So, the costs of the ANC’s decision far outweigh the benefits.

It is further likely to worsen the party’s unfavourable image in the country and Limpopo in particular. The victims of the VBS collapse are already interpreting the decision as the ANC’s show of the middle finger to them. Its timing may dent the morale of staff within the criminal justice cluster who might infer ANC hostility to the Hawks’ recent arrest of the so-called VBS eight. The Limpopo duo are accused of gross transgressions at the local government sphere.

According to the Motau report, Her Worship, Fulufhelo Florence Radzilani, the former mayor of the Vhembe municipality, received R300,000 – which she protested was too low – from the VBS to secure the municipality’s R300 million deposit with VBS for a period of six months.

Msiza is alleged to have played a pivotal role in getting some of Limpopo’s municipalities to deposit millions of rands into VBS in contravention of the MFMA, Municipal Investment Regulations and the municipalities’ own policies, which forbid municipalities from investing funds with mutual banks.

But if local economic growth and empowerment are central to what the nation should achieve, the MFMA’s prohibition of municipalities from investing funds in mutual banks is somewhat incongruent. But it is currently the law of the land. And let’s not fool one another, the law was not flouted for any radical transformation – economic or otherwise.

It was egregiously transgressed and poor people slighted so that a few gluttons could gorge themselves lavishly to the envy of all. The ANC leadership also speaks volumes about its mouth-deep commitment to clean local government. Or so it will be interpreted. During his tenure, the outgoing auditor-general, Kimi Makwetu, extensively reported on the deterioration of accountability, financial management and oversight in the 283 municipalities.

A catalogue of horror stories, Makwetu’s latest report is poignantly titled Not Much to go Round, yet not the Right Hands at the Till.

The decision is also likely to stimulate negative ethnic entrepreneurship in a province where ANC-made centrifugal tendencies are under way, with Vuwani and Malamulele as probably early morning exemplars of a potentially incremental harvest of thorns.

The trouble is not so much one of immediate Balkanisation as in a growing ethnic consciousness which exacerbates and replenishes problems, renders social cohesion difficult; nation formation even more.

You need look no further than the fact that Limpopo is the ideational stage upon which an improperly occupied erstwhile trade unionist and a thoroughly misguided young ministerial advisor jostle for pole position in pursuance of ethnic entrepreneurship: the former by advocating for ethnic bean counting of posts in the judiciary among others and the latter for extolling the virtues of the Bantustan era!

ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule is correct: justice forbids indefinite suspensions. But not at the expense of the voice and interests of people as a whole. To appreciate much of the unfathomable, we must be mindful of the menace of “smallanyana skeletons”, first postulated by ANC Women’s League president Bathabile Dlamini in 2016.

The skeletons placate the ANC in a daze of delusions of grandeur and subjectively conceived social and political facts, as Mbete put it. This, in turn, leads to ill-advised misadventures undergirded by a socially disastrous party and national incentive scheme that attracts, retains and rewards the negatively inclined to the detriment of society.

To its credit, the ANC underwrote its decision by commitment to a serious and hopefully dignified engagement with its structures and society as a whole. Let’s all respond to the invitation.

Mukoni Ratshitanga. Picture: Neil McCartney

Ratshitanga is a consultant, social and political commentator.

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