Graft shakes South Africa's vaunted ANC party
Several high-profile corruption scandals within the ruling party are weakening South Africans' confidence in the postapartheid government.
from the April 10, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Not improving fast enough
As bad as things are now, they are an improvement over the apartheid government, in which white politicians gave white businessmen contracts and favors in the name of national security.
"It's not that things are getting worse; it's that they are not getting better against the context of the higher standards of the new South African Constitution," argues Colm Allan, director of the Public Service Accountability Monitor, a private watchdog over government finance in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape Province.
"The problem is that the laws won't implement themselves, and when it comes to the capacity of the central government to monitor provinces, where 60 percent of the government funds are spent, that is very weak."
The heavy load of corruption cases appears to have overwhelmed South Africa's investigative agencies. Among the notable cases:
• In a bribery scandal over arms purchases this past year, ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma was removed from his job, but ultimately cleared by a court for allegedly receiving a bribe of 500,000 rand (about $70,000) from French defense contractor Thomson (now renamed Thales). The government ended up paying Zuma's 8 million rand (about $1.1 million) in defense attorney bills.
• In late March, 12 members of parliament (11 of them from the ruling ANC) were publicly reprimanded for stealing or defrauding up to 241,000 rand (about $33,000) each by using official parliamentary travel funds for personal travel. The parliamentary members were fined, but they will be allowed to keep their seats.
• In February, auditors revealed that an 800 million rand (about $112 million) loan by the Land Bank, a government institution established to help farmers, had gone sour. The loan, given to a company whose shareholders include ANC General Secretary Motlanthe, amounted to nearly one-third of the Land Bank's total assets, and apparently cannot be repaid. The government has since fired the Land Bank chairman and agreed to inject 700 million rand to keep the Land Bank operative.
Perhaps most troubling is the revelation that the popular program of Black Economic Empowerment is being used by government officials for personal enrichment. According to a recent auditor general report, some 50,000 government officials are running private businesses on the side, many of which rely on government contracts in fields that fall under their own regulatory authority.
Even some of the ANC's own coalition partners have begun to criticize its pro-poor policies, such as Black Empowerment, as a boondoggle.
"In this part of the world, we have a tradition of extremely strong executives starting off ruling in what they believe to be in the greater interests of society, like a benign dictatorship," says Mr. Allan. "This ends up more malicious than benign, as we see in Zimbabwe. That should raise the concerns over the long term."
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