EDITORIAL: Zondo is right about ANC turkeys

The sentiments of Raymond Zondo, SA’s chief justice, who said last week that the ANC would be incapable of preventing state capture from happening again, will have alarmed many. 

Zondo’s reasoning stemmed from the evidence of the way the party behaves in parliament — shielding its leaders from accountability to favour the party, not the people of SA, whatever the evidence. 

At an event organised by News24, Zondo said parliament had had “all the power” to stop state capture, but hadn’t done so “because the majority party didn’t want to stop it”.

In fact, he said, the evidence given by ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa at the state capture commission was that members of the party “should not vote in a motion of no confidence” if it is against their leader.

“If that is so, it is unlikely that the majority party would act differently and the question arises if we are at risk that what happened to us as a country would happen again at some stage, and parliament would not prevent that.”

It’s a bracing but pragmatic assessment — and distressing, given that SA spent R1bn of taxpayer money on a four-year commission that taught the country’s governing party not a thing. 

Depressingly, this was only underscored last week during the disrupted parliamentary sitting in which Ramaphosa was grilled about the theft of dollars from his Phala Phala farm.

While the conduct of the opposition left much to be desired, the fracas illustrated that very little has changed in the ANC’s approach towards holding its leaders accountable.

Ramaphosa, despite his constitutional obligation to answer questions, opted to remain schtum, keeping the country in the dark.

Unfortunately, mediocre politicians aren’t confined to the National Assembly. Local government, too, is plagued by base politicking, as we saw in the City of Joburg last week.

In that case, the ordeal began when parties that were part of the DA-led coalition turned on the DA and voted to oust speaker Vasco da Gama at a late-night council sitting.

Now their aim is to remove DA mayor Mpho Phalatse and re-elect an ANC mayor. But the coalition against Phalatse hasn’t been able to raise one semi-coherent argument why she should be ousted. And in the absence of that, it all looks like a craven case of settling scores — with the interests of Joburg residents the last thing on their self-interested minds.

The Joburg standoff is messy, with councillors betraying coalition agreements and even their own party lines. It gets murkier still, now that Phalatse and her allies in the council have laid charges of bribery against two ANC councillors. One councillor has filed an affidavit claiming he was offered R2m by the ANC to vote against the DA-led coalition. 

It’s probably not surprising that these pampered politicians have prioritised their own needs above those of the citizens, since it’s a habit repeated in councils across the country, right up into parliament. 

Nonetheless, this should be seen as a loud warning bell that electoral reform cannot wait. 

While there is such a process in the works — the Constitutional Court has ordered that the Electoral Act be amended to align with the constitution, by allowing independent candidates to participate in elections — this process has foundered.

That, too, is predictable, for the very reason that the turkeys who sit in political office were always unlikely to vote for Christmas, even if they were able to miraculously stir themselves from their political infighting. The ANC, and large opposition parties, are resistant to the wholesale reforms recommended in the early 2000s by the Van Zyl Slabbert commission.

As a result, there are fears that parliament is unlikely to meet the December deadline to fix the Electoral Act. The ANC, as with state capture, will use its muscle as a majority to avoid strengthening the constitution — just as it has avoided doing anything that benefits citizens, rather than itself.