DENNIS WEBSTER: Not the rotten apples, not even the orchards — the soil itself is the problem

Even the staunchest critics of SA’s ability to stamp out state capture would have entertained secret flurries of optimism last week. McKinsey SA was charged with theft, fraud and corruption. The Treasury froze Bain & Co from government contracts for the next decade. Mosebenzi Zwane, the one-time mineral resources minister, was arrested along with two former Sahara Computers employees in connection with the Estina dairy project. And the Hawks ran a field day around Nelson Mandela Bay, arresting allegedly corrupt councillors and municipal officials.

A few weeks earlier, Terence Nombembe, the Zondo commission’s head of investigations, told a conference convened by the Public Affairs Research Institute and the Council for the Advancement of the SA Constitution that the root of SA corruption is greed.

Nombembe’s diagnosis found ready agreement. Allison Anthony, who directs Unisa’s African Procurement Law Unit, called corruption a “human problem”. David Lewis, a member of the interim National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council advising President Cyril Ramaphosa over the next few years on the institutional form of a more permanent anticorruption agency, lamented the size of the “rotten orchard” in SA’s public service that would need to be pruned.

But when Ramaphosa tables his eagerly awaited plans for implementing the commission’s recommendations in parliament later in October, it is the soil in which the orchard grows, and not the trees themselves, that should be his concern. This is an opportunity to begin decoupling corruption and greed in the public imagination.

It is encouraging to know that Ramaphosa has already instructed the National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council to examine the Zondo commission’s recommendations from strategic, structural and institutional perspectives, not just a prosecutorial perspective. Herein may be the seeds of a public reckoning with the reality that something that is at once more convoluted and feasibly changed than greed is at play in the capture of the state.

Greed is old. It prepared the way for us and it will survive us. Our long historical preoccupation with greed began in spiritual and theological terms before maturing into considerations of its social threats. One fifth-century poet, capturing the Christian thinking of the time, wrote that “because the minds of many have been tainted by this disease, avarice is the root, the cause, the head, the fount and the origin of evil”. It takes a particularly haughty SA exceptionalism to think the country’s experience of greed is unique, or that this will somehow be the place where it is finally rooted out.

And yet, for all of its deep civilisational roots, greed takes on fundamentally modern forms. For as long as markets remain the primary engine of society and distributor of wealth and resources, excess will remain alongside them. It was one of the free market’s most notable champions, Milton Friedman, who said that capitalism is the “arrangement under which greed will do the least harm”.

Greed runs throughout the bedtime story version of state capture; the tale of a struggle between an avaricious network of politicians, business people and officials bent on self-enrichment — the rotten orchard — and a principled band of citizens, activists, and “good” politicians and business people.

Much of this is true. But it is only part of the story. Meaningful reform will mean coming to terms with corruption’s bigger institutional picture. And getting the bigger picture right will mean talking about more than greed.

There is no neat relationship between corrupt officials and state capture, in which the end of one simply entails rooting out the other. As researchers at the Public Affairs Research Institute have noted, for instance, “irregularity indicates a breakdown in the control environment. It is, of course, not corruption. It is common for irregularity to issue from causes other than corruption. It is relatively easy to follow public procurement rules while corrupt.”

SA corruption is the result of far deeper social forces, playing out both within the ANC and the state, looking to wrest power from existing technocrats and elites in order to forge new and local elites. It is a project that Karl Von Holdt of Wits University’s Society, Work and Politics Institute has described as being “focused on re-embedding finance, production and class formation in the national territory of SA, as well as assert the sovereignty of the state in attempting to address the conditions of the people”.

Corruption is less a question of rotten apples and more about class formation in democratic SA, and the deeply embedded struggle over the shape of its economy. Rather than wayward individuals, corruption in the state is made up of large and knotted patronage networks that envelop hundreds of thousands of people. It is often the reason they are able to put food on the table. It was into this almost pervasive informal political system that the networks that now so devastatingly appropriate public goods for private gain were able to sink their roots.

So, what would a collective reckoning with the sociological complexities of corruption mean for how SA recovers from its ravages?

Anticorruption, for one, is a horizon too modest and unreliable. Evidence suggests that it takes more than the ethical leaders and mobilised citizens at the heart of SA’s current anticorruption efforts to wrest a state from the clutches of patronage. And even then, similar to corruption itself, anticorruption is a form of politics open to capture at the right time for the wrong reasons. In Brazil and India, effective right-wing mobilisations around anticorruption brought strongmen to power who have spent the last decade dishing out human and planetary devastation like they were playthings.

Similarly, while they are undoubtedly cause for celebration, prosecutorial victories against state capture — which are still too few, but growing — will not end the system.

Instead, SA’s political horizons should take the shape of state institutions that are less reliant on the character of their leaders. Ramaphosa should turn his focus towards building institutions that ensure good people, rather than finding good people to save our institutions. It is in the integrity of institutions, and not people, that real emancipatory futures can be found.

The president should not limit his plans to the rotten orchard, or how we might best prune it back. If the state is to approach the institutionalised redistribution of wealth so desperately required, it is to the soil from which the orchard grows that Ramaphosa and his administration should look.

• Webster is a freelance writer commissioned by the Public Affairs Research Institute to attend its state capture conference, which took place on September 14 and 15.