Was Ramaphosa Set Up?

 The report by the Section 89 Independent Panel headed by retired judge Sandile Ngcobo raises more questions than it answers. 

The difference between the Arthur Fraser version and the Cyril Ramaphosa version is intriguing and hints at many possibilities. I explore one here: what if Ramaphosa was set up? Was it a dirty trick by the Zuma camp to entrap him? If so: should we feel sorry for him?

 

The Zuma camp certainly has motive. Ramaphosa is going after them, if a lot slower than some would like. SARS has had some of its capacity restored. Prosecutions out of the Zondo commission are starting, if at the speed of the Snail Olympics. And we must not forget the promise (or was it a threat?) from Zuma to dish out the dirt on others if he goes down.

 

How about means? The Zuma camp is deeply embedded in state security; while they undermined SARS, capturing intelligence services and SAPS were really their strength. They certainly could infiltrate the presidential household.

 

The question then arises as to how Fraser knew about the whole thing and why the details he furnished differed substantially from the Ramaphosa version, specifically the amount of money involved and how it got there. In the Fraser version, it was $4-million and was moved in a couch from Hyde Park by Bejani Chauke, a presidential advisor. In the Ramaphosa version, it was $580,000 lodged at his farm by a mysterious Sudanese visitor, Mustafa Mohamed Ibrahim Hazim, on 25 December 2019, in payment for 20 buffalo that were apparently never delivered. The following day, Ramaphosa was informed and decided to keep the money on the farm since the general manager, a Mr Von Wielligh, was away. The person dealing with the transaction, Sylvester Ndlovu, was uncomfortable with leaving so much money in a safe accessible to others while he was on leave and therefore hid it in the couch.

 

On the face of it, both versions are improbable.

 

Why would someone choose to move $4-million in a couch? That amount of money in $100-bills would weigh about 40kg, which would add substantially to the weight of a couch. This amount of money takes up about 45 litres, so it would fit into a normal suitcase, though it would make the couch a unusually heavy to pick up. Given that the president travels with a blue-light security detail, all he would have to do to organize taking such funds to his farm would be to pack them in a couple of suitcases. Who is going to search the president’s luggage? A couch, on the other hand, that was suspiciously heavy, you would think would attract the attention of the presidential security team.

 

The Ramaphosa version is attacked by the report as lacking critical details to make it plausible. $580,000 – again, in $100 bills to make it wieldy – is a more plausible amount of money for one person to handle as it weighs less than 6kg and would fit into a shopping bag. It is however odd, as the Ngcobo report points out, that someone would go shopping for something so expensive on a public holiday when most people are on leave. And pay for a purchase and not ensure it was delivered.

 

This is now where proper investigative skills and evidence-gathering need to be applied. I am not the police or SIU, so I can only offer a possible explanation. I emphasize that this is only speculation and I have no evidence of my own.

 

If the plan was to set Ramaphosa up, it makes perfect sense that someone would show up at his farm when major decision-makers were on leave with a large sum of foreign currency to set up a scandal. A possibly fake Sudanese identity would fit this scenario and is a whole lot more plausible than shifting a large sum of money all the way from Hyde Park in a couch. This is where things start to get murky. Why would Fraser allege that the amount was $4-million when it was actually $580,000? Why would Ramaphosa admit to the smaller amount only, when the larger amount would possibly turn up later? The most plausible explanation is that Fraser set up the whole thing with $4-million and some minion stole the balance, leaving a much smaller but still potentially embarrassing amount at Phala Phala.

 

I will not speculate on further details: this merely sets the scene for a more detailed investigation. However, if Rapamaphosa was indeed set up, should we feel sorry for him? On his own version, he knew about a potentially dodgy amount of $580,000 on 26 December 2019, yet he took no steps as far as we know to investigate who Hazim was, or how the money came to arrive at his farm. The subsequent alleged theft only builds on these inexplicable details. If a large sum of money crosses any high official or political leader’s path without a clear explanation, the best option is to dump it immediately on law enforcement and keep out of the way. Why did Ramaphosa not do that?

 

In the end, this could turn out for Ramaphosa to be something akin to a painful ingrown toenail, something that hurts him but no one else. Compared with the metastatic cancer of state capture that hurts everyone but the corrupt beneficiaries, it is a relatively minor lapse. But it does point to a sloppy attitude to personal finance at best, and willingness to accept funds from dodgy sources at worst.

 

If South Africa is to truly escape the costs of criminalization of government we need to hold everyone in public office to high standards.

 

Ramaphosa has serious questions to answer. But so does the Zuma camp. South Africa as a nation deserves better. We are not going to get there by taking sides. We need answers from everyone involved and a thorough investigation that considers all possible explanations. I have raised one possibility but the correct explanation is the one that is supported by the evidence. That is what we should all be demanding.

The South African Opposition Challenge

Split of the vote since 1994: ANC is essentially at its
1994 level after increases in 1999 and 2004; the DA
has about the same share as the NP+DP in 1994.

When the dust has settled on the elections and the DA and EFF are over their triumph at a big swing in their direction (5.6% to the DA taking them to 22.2%, 6.4% from nothing to the EFF), we have to sit back and look at the big picture.

The total gains of these two parties are more than 3 times the swing of 3.75% from the ANC.

A remarkable thing about this election is how little the ANC was hurt by a string of scandals and blunders. While a swing of nearly 4% is pretty big, the ANC’s share of the vote in 2014 is only 0.5% below its level in the first democratic election in 1994 (illustrated, right).

Most of the DA and EFF increase has come from the collapse of other opposition party votes. Part of the DA swing is also accounted for by taking over Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats, who scored nearly 1% last time. COPE alone lost nearly 7%, and most minor parties lost votes.

While the DA has done well to increase its votes every election, chasing after votes of other minor parties has had the inevitable consequence of the DA losing coherence, with nasty infighting and selective leaks, some of which can only emanate from senior leadership. It was this selective leak culture that made the proposed deal with Agang very difficult to stitch together – leaks forced a premature announcement, leading to confusion.

Vote since 1994 including National Party 1994: the
opposition has essentially gone sideways and the ANC
has not really been punished for lack of performance.

The DA, to put things in perspective, in 2014 has about the same vote share as the combined Democratic Party (1.7%) and National Party (20.4%) vote in 1994 (total 22.1%). While this may be from a different demographic split (if you look at provincial votes, there are some big shifts), the DA has not significantly grown the opposition vote. In fact, given that they have picked up some support from black voters who would not have voted for the National Party, it is surprising that their vote share is no bigger than the combined DP-NP vote of 1994.

Look at the second picture: the dashed lines show that the conservative opposition vote has barely shifted since 1994, as has that of the ANC, while other opposition parties have been trading places rather than growing overall.

Another truly remarkable thing about this election is the way communities that have most reason to be upset about government failure still vote solidly ANC – sometimes with 80-90% of the vote. Ironically, where government has failed less, opposition parties score more votes. The DA has a real shot at winning a number of metros where the ANC vote has dropped to close to or even below 50%. These include Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela and Tshwane.

Despite all the complaints about potholes, e-tolls and the like, services in the metros are way better than in ANC-run small towns and deep rural areas. Where I live in Makana in the Eastern Cape, some township residents have been without water for months, some even years. Most rural schools are of a poor standard, and many rural communities have little or no cash economy besides social grants, with no prospect of jobs.

The ANC meanwhile is increasingly focused on pandering to the needs of a self-serving elite. The opposition made too much of Nkandla, allowing the ANC to paint a rosy picture of “good stories” – as if Nkandla was a glitch. Yet by the government’s own figures, R33-billion was lost to waste and corruption last financial year, an Nkandla every three days. No, not a glitch. This is the way the government usually does business.

 To resolve the mystery of why so many people who have cause for complaint vote ANC solidly, we have to look to history for why the excluded poor do not automatically rise up against a self-serving elite. In medieval times, a “good” lord ensured his serfs didn’t starve, since they were valuable as a pool of labour and as cannon fodder when a lord was called on to provide soldiers. Serfs were never allowed too much though – that would give them ideas above their station. Feudalism eventually ended when labour became scarce after Europe was depopulated by crusades, creating an opening for a working class with commercially valued labour.

As De Tocqueville observed, revolution broke out in France not because conditions were especially bad there, but because they were better than average in Europe – frustrated hope is a much bigger drive for change than utter hopelessness.

And that is the key to opposition politics in South Africa: very poor people on the edge of starvation are inherently conservative. They do not rebel against the existing order, not matter how unfair, if the existing order can instil in them the fear that they will do even worse if things change.

How unfair is the existing order? The worst off 20% of the population earn less than 3% of national income, and more than half of that is social grants. The best-off 10% account for over 50% of national income.

When out campaigning for Agang, one of the most incongruous sights was seeing a top of the line Merc festooned with ANC socks on its side mirrors cruising through a scene of extreme poverty. Why did those who had been left behind not bitterly resent the theft of public resources that went into that Merc? For the same reason a lord and retinue of knights in shining armour could parade through scenes of medieval poverty without risk of attack. Feudalism was such a complete trap that the victims could see no way out.

Here’s bad news for opposition parties: feudalism was an extremely enduring system. However, a key difference between the old kind and the new kind is we nominally live in a democracy. It is theoretically possible for a political movement to arise that challenges the system. It hasn’t happened yet, judging from the voting pattern of the last 20 years.

Why did Agang not do well this last election? Part of it was the difficulty of scaling up a new organization from nothing – the EFF for example had a large chunk of the ANC Youth League to build on. Another part was we were trying to address this dysfunction of the political system by addressing the left out voters – but the inherent conservatism of the victimized poor makes them a difficult constituency to win over. Much has been made of the failed DA deal – that was a setback, but cannot explain the whole problem.

I supported Agang because of Mamphela Ramphele’s history in Black Consciousness. What we badly need in this country is a revitalizing of hope, and the BC message of self-reliance, self-respect and rejection of externally-imposed limits is very much needed in South Africa today. It remains to be seen if the Agang project can survive the setback of a very low vote – but it is a worthwhile project and I intend to continue to pursue its goals.

Nkandla: ANC’s Strategy to Win

Agang’s campaign in the Eastern Cape occupies two worlds. We talk to the forgotten people, the communities where nothing works, there are no jobs and no way out. They want to be heard and they want a reason for hope. Then we enter the world of political debates, where everything is about point-scoring, who shouts the loudest and political posturing.

The PE debate (Source: Herald)

Tuesday 8 April: I am speaking for Agang in a debate in Port Elizabeth with 7 other parties, and the other opposition parties find a way to work Nkandla into every other sentence, sending the ANC part of the crowd into a frenzy each time.

Sorry, I am too much an academic to play this sort of game. We discovered the ANC’s on switch. Now talk about everything else, the humiliation and pain our people experience every day, and what we are going to do about it. How we can restore pride, rebuild hope and rekindle the promise of our new democracy of 20 years ago? But the ANC are the ones to watch. Nkandla is their issue, and you have to wonder how they can go into an election with such a liability.

So what is the ANC speaker’s response to all this? He totally ignores all reference to Nkandla and goes on about his party’s track record.

What track record? I wonder, having just been to a place called Taliban in the vicinity of Uitenhage. This is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever seen, with people living in utter hopelessness amidst heaps of trash. I talk to young people who passed matric and have no jobs. They are angry and feel betrayed.

Then the light comes on. This is the ANC game plan. Let the opposition shout Nkandla at the top of their voices, and calmly prattle on about all the good the ANC is doing. The message: Nkandla was a cock-up but otherwise we are doing just fine.

Well, are they?

Last financial year the government by their own figures lost R33-billion to wasteful spending and corruption. That’s one Nkandla every three days.

Nkandla is not an anomaly. It’s the way the government regularly does business.

And that’s just the money they admit to wasting – no doubt totally leaving out the waste of a bloated bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape Health Department that leaves insufficient funds for medical staff, to quote one example.

It is wastage on this scale that makes all our problems seem so hard. Yes, equalizing education post-apartheid was always going to be a challenge. The same for delivering quality health care to the poor and fixing economic inequality. We are not going to solve any of these problems by throwing money down the toilet on a vast scale (in parts of the country that have toilets).

In this weird inside-out looking-glass world, a government that flushes money away more efficiently than it delivers clean water has found a way to turn what should be a massive liability into an electoral advantage. A way of personifying corruption and incompetence in the president, while somehow carrying off the fiction that his personality has nothing to do with the government he heads.

Agang visits Glenmore

I think about the people in Glenmore, a dry dusty apartheid forced removal dumping ground also here in the Eastern Cape. No jobs, no hope, nothing to look forward to but the next social grant day.

Would people living in a trash heap be happy that the government has turned Nkandla into an electoral strategy to evade the issues that blight their lives?

Here’s a challenge for the ANC. Maybe you should go and ask them. Try Taliban and Glenmore to see if you get the same answer.

But first, disguise yourself as a human being. I’ll lend you my Agang T-shirt.

But of course the ANC will not take up this challenge, because Nkandla is their strategy to win. By talking loudly about this one thing, opposition parties turn the voters’ attention away from the other 120-times Nkandla-scale misspending that happens every year. We implicitly accept the ANC line that everything else is fine by making this one big failure the only one we shout about.

The personality of the president is not incidental to the ANC. It embodies what the ANC stands for now: a party of greed and self-enrichment.

Every person in Glenmore, Taliban and countless other townships and settlements who live lives of hopelessness and despair deserve better. It is Agang’s mission to change this country for the better, and that will not happen if we let the ANC get away with this. At very least, we should force them to defend their entire track record, not just disgracefully profligate expenditure on a financially incontinent president’s house.

The sad thing is that the money gone on waste and corruption could go a long way towards the social programmes we need to turn this country around. We do not need crazy economic policies or empty promises. What we need is sound governance and active citizens who stand up for themselves – a rekindling of the promise of freedom that burnt so bright in 1994.

Black Economic Empowerment: What Went Wrong?

I’m all for black economic empowerment. What’s the alternative? A society where most are miserable and have neither prospects nor hope is not a friendly place to live. The haves live in cages. The have-nots rattle the cages, when they are not too hopeless to do anything. So why has BEE not delivered?

A huge part of the problem is the ANC’s top-down approach, strangely similar to Reagan’s trickle-down economics. Like Reaganomics, top-down BEE doesn’t work. In the US, the already rich became richer. Here, equality ended when we equalized the number of billionaires.

In a stark example of what’s wrong with BEE, I recently read an application for a gambling license for a small Eastern Cape town. The application in effect said, “This town lacks the economic base to sustain entertainment businesses, so we are filling the gap by offering the community drinking and gambling.” If you sit back and think about this, the notion is pretty obnoxious. A town that lacks the base of disposable income to support entertainment would, you’d think, not be able to support the proposed business – unless its clientele spend money on drink and gambling that’s not disposable income. In other words, they go home broke and the family doesn’t eat that week.

That though is not my main point about this proposal. One of the “key persons” listed is a car factory production line employee who is interested in getting into the gambling business.

Why would someone with no relevant experience be a “key person”? Because of a BEE requirement for earning a license. So why is this bad?

A black person who already has a job and therefore is a lot better off than the average in a poor province stands to get rich. Many other black people, should the application and similar ones for other poor towns be granted, stand to move from poor to destitute. How is that black economic empowerment?

But it gets worse. Why has the gambling company nominated someone with no relevant experience? Because their new business partner is going to sit in the background spending his new wealth and not interfere with the white baas. How can he interfere when all he knows is car parts?

Zoom out from this one example to the big picture. The faustian deal the ANC made when taking power nearly twenty years ago was that its favoured people would become instantly wealthy, and the needs of the poor would be parked indefinitely. BEE is the “fix” that hides this sorry fact. BEE that takes the form of deliberate promotion of black incompetents to prevent real transfer of control is directly related to lack of delivery. Both in government appointments and in choice of government contractors, this same game is being played. It suits both sides. The ANC can cement its base by patronage, and the old baasskap players can carry on much as before with a little camouflage.

The sad thing is this is not really in anyone’s interest. While it’s true that some people have become obscenely rich in a relatively short time, that wealth cannot really be enjoyed if you have to live in a cage. The white population, the newly empowered black population and those who have managed to rise above poverty without suckling on the BEE teat are living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, the excluded masses will demand their share. In the meantime, our cages are rattled harder and harder.

So what’s to be done?

The ANC is so steeped in the politics of patronage that it’s hard to see it changing, which is sad given the party’s history. Past the 20th anniversary of ANC rule, I expect an increasing fraction of voters who did not grow up with apartheid to be open to other options. The DA doesn’t have a narrative with mass appeal. The smaller parties show no signs of rapid growth. What of the newer players? Malema’s notion of economic freedom ends when he’s liberated wealth in his direction. Agang still needs to hit its stride. I don’t know what it stands for aside from “ANC bad”. A party that promises to do roughly what the ANC stands for but do it right could be in with a chance. On the other hand, Mamphela Ramphele was a senior executive at the World Bank, and I have not heard her repudiating its disastrous structural adjustment jihad. Agang is holding a policy workshop this weekend, so let’s see how that foes. I’d rather judge on results than history, since the ANC has amply demonstrated that history has little influence on how you behave now.

My fear is that all this will lead to another Arab Spring movement – a mass uprising driven by youth with cell phones, with a clear idea of grievance but no clear sense of what to do about it. What South Africa desperately needs now is a clear lead on what to do post-ANC. And that time is fast approaching.

The real significance of the Zuma wang painting

Some may be wondering why the ruling ANC made such a massive issue of a painting hung in a gallery that would have been seen by maybe a few hundred people had the government not made it such a massive issue. There’s been comment along the lines that the ANC obviously doesn’t understand the Streisand Effect. For those who haven’t heard of it, in 2003 Barbara Streisand’s lawyers tried to have a picture of her mansion, part of a web site illustrating coastal erosion, removed. Before they made the issue public, the picture had been viewed 6 times, 2 of which were her own lawyers. Arising from the publicity of the case, the picture was viewed over 400,000 times during the next month.

Of course the ANC knew what they were doing. All this happened in the context of a situation where the ruling party is facing increasing flak for corruption, nepotism and failure to deliver.

The thing that really brought it home to me was when I was listening to SAfm and right after we were told that  the gallery and the ANC had reached agreement, with some details to be announced after a march of 15,000 people, the Gauteng Transport MEC was on air explaining that e-tolls (an issue that had raised ire across a swath of constituencies that usually hate each other) were perfectly normal, in line with the accepted economic principle of user pays.

The thing is, the user pays principle is a cornerstone of liberal economics, and the ANC claims to be fundamentally opposed to liberalism, to the extent of a visceral hatred of the rather tame opposition Democratic Alliance. I’ve heard this hatred justified by a claim that the DA represents a throwback to the apartheid regime, a rather odd claim given that the rump of the National Party abandoned the DA project and joined the ANC.

So what’s this all about, really?

The ANC is mobilising around populist outrage to disguise the fact that they have not only failed to deliver, but they have become their own enemies.

Not so Liberated

In the latter half of 2011, an official from one of South Africa’s more disfunctional provincial governments, being quizzed on the popular radio station SAfm about a delivery failure, tried to weasel out by claiming that a study was in progress. The interviewer didn’t let him get away with this and wanted to know why this solved the problem when, the last time the issue came up, a study was commissioned, and nothing was subsequently done.

More recently, an academic told me of a story of how a dysfunctional municipal government commissioned a study on service delivery. Once the academic had started the study, it transpired that some consultants had already written a lengthy report covering exactly the same ground. The academic took this report to the town council, and asked whether this report could simply be used, rather than wastefully duplicate the work. “No,” was the response, “we want you to do this.” Naturally, both reports are now sitting gathering dust. The methodology it appears is to produce reports as a substitute for taking action. That way, each new set of incumbents can appear to take action without having to do any hard work.

This attitude that I can only characterise as stealing your salary is rampant in the (now not so) new South Africa. It is perfectly understandable that someone who starts out with nothing and who lands a well-paid job, after casting off the shackles of an oppressive system, should feel that they have arrived and do not need to do anything else. Like work. But that attitude is totally wrong. In a poor country, only a small minority have that option open to them. Not only is the majority denied the government services they are entitled to expect, but the money spent on high salaries for won’t work officials and politicians could be spent more effectively where the job actually would be done. What is ultimately behind this is a lack of leadership. The ruling party has no prospect of losing an election, and has become lazy in office.

I have a couple of examples of what can be done. The local hospital in Grahamstown was very poorly run, and a private operator offered to take over management in exchange for using a wing for private services. The staff expected to be fired but instead, with effective management, they are now doing the job they were being paid to do all along. In another hospital elsewhere in the country, a lawyer visited a family member who was in a ward that was filthy and where the nurses were failing to pay attention to the patients. He told a senior nurse exactly what remedies were open to a person savvy about the law and the next day, the ward was utterly transformed. The thing that struck him though was that the staff seemed a lot happier actually doing their jobs.

What has happened? How has South Africa’s liberation gone so far  wrong?

It’s as if those fortunate enough to land a government job, liberated from an ugly and unpleasant prison where they were unjustly incarcerated with no hope of escape, have placed themselves under house arrest in a mansion with all the facilities. They remain imprisoned in a mentality that says Black people are useless and unable to do a competent job. In that sense, apartheid has won. Steve Biko was right: liberation is not only about political change but also about psychological liberation.

What’s to be done? I fear the ANC is past redemption, and the overall situation can only improve in a big way if their political power is undone, something that is unlikely to happen in less than 20 years since liberation, roughly the time it takes for a majority of voters to be too young to remember the previous regime. In the meantime, people of goodwill who want change should focus on working with community members who want things to be better, and stop trying to work with government. Working with a government that is unwilling or unable to deliver beyond deploying cardres to plum jobs is not only a waste of time, but an exercise in frustration.