Peter Bruce is correct to note the omission of any reference to cadre deployment in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s response to the report and recommendations of the Zondo state-capture commission, and the scope this continues to create for ongoing malfeasance. (“Agencies, advisers and boards, boards, boards”, October 26).
It is important to understand why. On one level it is simply a matter of crass political optics. To own up to the illegality of a strategy that has been central to the ANC’s political and governance conduct would be cripplingly embarrassing. This would be the case for the party as a whole, and for the president personally, as he chaired the deployment committee during a significant part of the state-capture period.
But such a concession would imply renouncing the ANC’s claims on the country’s politics: that as a “national liberation movement” it is SA’s natural leader, an ordained hegemon or, as it once described itself, “the most important moral voice of the country on almost any question facing the country”.
That it has wielded power 28 years in a manner inconsistent with the constitution would be an admission that its self-conception has been integral to SA’s malaise. It is unlikely to do that.
The president defended cadre deployment before the commission, and stressed that its recommendations are not binding. The presidency has even gone to court to defend this practice.
Understand that this posture places hard limits on the scope of reform. The commission’s contentions were quite correct, that this practice is not only damaging to governance practice but corrosive of our institutions. It cannot be done better; it must be done away with.
Unfortunately, the reformist repertoire does not extend that far.
Terence Corrigan
Institute of Race Relations
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.