By Irvin Jim - NUMSA, October 7, 2015
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s. The following event is unfolding as this goes to press:
A. The origins and foundations of South Africa’s unique corruption
There is concrete evidence, and also an admission by a key individual with a conscience, Ronnie Kasrils, about the extent of the sell-out deals the ANC made with capital during the 1990s, namely that the ANC would only get political power, without economic power, and that no radical measures would be embarked upon to restructure and to transform the South African economy.
We now know for certain that those deals sold the struggle for liberation in South African down the drain, and instead they ensured that post apartheid South Africa would be an extremely corrupt neoliberal capitalist state and society. South Africa is now in that space – an Olympic gold medal winning corrupt neoliberal capitalist system and society.
In place of the radical and full implementation of the Freedom Charter, the ANC abandoned both the philosophy and ideology of the liberation struggle – which were based on moving South Africa out of apartheid capitalism and all its evils including corruption and environmental destruction, into a society free of racism, colonialism, patriarchy and one of shared human values, social and economic justice and a transition to socialism.
Such a society was not capable of being created on the foundation of our inherited racist and patriarchal colonial capitalism.
Secretly and publicly, the ANC sold the dream for a racism free, equal and just society for a neoliberal capitalist society, complete with the corruption that comes with that package.
Apart from accepting International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank neoliberal capitalist dogma, and guaranteeing that land justice would never take place outside the capitalist markets, here are some of the deals the ANC struck with the devil, literally and figuratively, between 1990 and 1994:
- The ANC accepted to repay $25 billion of inherited apartheid-era foreign debt (October 1993).
- They gave the central bank formal independence in the interim and final constitutions (November 1993 and July 1996).
- They borrowed $850 million from the IMF with tough conditions (December 1993)
- They reappoint apartheid finance minister Derek Keys and SA Reserve Bank governor Chris Stals (May 1994).
- They agreed that South Africa would join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later renamed World Trade Organisation) on disadvantageous terms (August 1994).
- They agreed to lower the main corporate tax rate from 48% to 29% and maintain countless privileges enjoyed by wealthy white people and corporations (1994-99)
- They agreed to privatise peripheral parts of the state (January 1995).
- They agreed to relax exchange controls (the ‘finrand’) and raise interest rates (March 1995).
- They granted permission to South Africa’s biggest companies to move their financial headquarters to London (1999).
- Finally, of course, they adopt a neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy (June 1996).
The adoption of the GEAR policy (June 1996) effectively buried any hope of sustaining any liberation ethos and cultures, as South Africa was now fully confirmed as a neoliberal capitalist state and society replete with all the cutthroat competition, capitalist greed and pathological craving for accumulation of wealth by all means necessary including all and extreme forms of corruption.
All that we have said above is in the public domain. Why are our own state regulators, academics and journalists not blowing the whistle? Why must it take the FBI to tell us the details of the $10 million bribe that Thabo Mbeki and Danny Jordaan made to Sepp Blatter’s cronies, and the $6 million (R80 million) that Chancellor House made from the corrupt Hitachi deal to build Medupi’s boilers?
In effect an elite has agreed to use its control of the state to allow the white racist colonial capitalist foundation of South Africa to remain intact, in the process, allowing white dominated and foreign corporations to continue with their economic activities unchanged. It has done this in exchange for a share of the spoils. We know some of them are direct beneficiaries. They are businessmen and women during the night and politicians during the day. And of course their families are crony capitalists night and day. Today, the ANC itself acknowledges this fact – just read their 2015 NGC documents.
There is no difference between the ANC and the network of public officials and private individuals who agree to corruptly allocate tenders in exchange for a share of the spoils. This behaviour is a logical and necessary corrupt character structure of the society that neoliberal capitalism thrives on.