Nkosikhulule Nyembezi
Cape Town - The eye of a hurricane can be astonishingly tranquil – an ominous serenity that presages a collision with another wall of storm.
There is something of that eeriness about the current lull in implementing the 11 recommendations for Parliament made by Chief Justice Raymond Zondo in the Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture reports.
None will be implemented by May 23, as Parliament will probably miss its self-imposed target. The wind dropped last November after the National Assembly’s rules committee accepted President Cyril Ramaphosa’s implementation plan for the recommendations.
Still, Parliament delayed the departure date by setting a deadline of May 23, and went into recess.
In February, MPs came to Cape Town to mind other business, and the implementation plan is receiving little attention, yet there is still barely a breeze of urgency.
So far, only two portfolio committees – Home Affairs and Scopa – have met to talk about the recommendations, both in February.
However, the two portfolio committees have not discussed the recommendations in depth. In addition, several proposals from opposition parties to implement the recommendations were shot down or sidelined.
The National Assembly schedule in the coming weeks has no significant government anti-corruption business.
It is hard to legislate for life beyond the state capture commission without first legislating for the fight against corruption.
Social partners worried that something like this would happen.
Something intrinsic to the recommendations seems to prevent the ANC government from processing them normally – something ordinary citizens find indigestible.
The parliamentary arithmetic and the divisions within parties are proximate reasons for the slow progress, but they do not sufficiently explain the atmosphere of intellectual and psychological paralysis.
The National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) Investigating Directorate (ID) is in a race against time to be constituted permanently through an act of Parliament following delays since October last year when Ramaphosa tabled his “implementation plan” in response to the Zondo Commission’s report.
Then, he announced that Parliament would pass legislation to make the ID a permanent body with powers similar to those of the disbanded Scorpions.
However, seven months later, Parliament has yet to finalise the legislation to effect this change.
Presenting the NPA’s budget and annual performance plan to the portfolio committee on justice and correctional services on May 12, National Director of Public Prosecutions, Shamila Batohi, said: “If we don’t get these legislative changes, the ID will not be able to do the work that we plan to do in the coming year.”
Arguments that might persuade sensible anti-corruption individuals in the ANC to get behind Ramaphosa’s gentle approach to anti-corruption are drifting in the opposite direction.
It is the Rubik’s Cube problem: actions that line up colours on one face mess up the opposing face.
South Africans need a dramatic shift towards a sober assessment of Parliament’s strategic place in the national anti-corruption drive and the available terms of a future relationship with various social partners.
Debate is moving in the other direction. A dominant portion of the ANC factions believes that the party could comfortably finish its term in office with no milestones at all in implementing the commission’s recommendations, and the prospect of a leadership contest prevents known serious anti-corruption voices in the party from confronting that delusion.
Most of the party’s members and a large tranche of its MPs think a positive track record of implementing the recommendations should form part of the election campaign.
However, the leadership that is beholden to factions will not surrender the concept.
Any pact among ANC factions will have to involve various leaders upsetting their respective factions in ways neither leader is inclined to do before the 2024 elections.
But all faction leaders would prefer that the other take responsibility for the implementation plan breaking down. There is also a tacit agreement between different factions that Parliament should not be the determining institution on the pace and course of the implementation process.
The May 23 deadline should have thrown a cordon of realism around the debate and dithering, and it is revealing that the opposite happened.
Essentially this is an unhealthy compression after a lengthy period of intensity following the commission’s hearings and report-writing sessions that left South Africans physically and emotionally debilitated while waiting for Ramaphosa to act decisively.
But to the ANC, May 23 was not distant enough for Parliament to afford a leisurely reappraisal of priorities and to decompress the country from the choking delays in arresting and prosecuting corrupt politicians and their connections.
The dynamic of multiple deadline extensions to process all the recommendations was a rolling corrective to the anti-corruption delay fantasies.
That dissonant sound has faded away, and defenders of the corrupt individuals continue to fantasise that they are free to go back to thinking about the recommendations in terms they find more in harmony with their old prejudices.
It is six months – the same period elapsed since November when the ANC was supposed to act on the strength of the recommendations, during which it made no progress.
The country is no closer to witnessing any convictions of implicated persons.
That is a distinct action category from waiting for the criminal justice system processes. One the government can do over a long period, and the other the ANC can do overnight.
Instead of acting swiftly, it is letting it dry as if it is a revolution built on a jumble of social and economic discontent, formal procedures and presumptions of innocence, hope and fear, with no end in sight because it attempts party renewal at the expense of the country by a mechanism that reliably diminishes our collective national efforts to fight corruption. It is pain sold as a painkiller.
Batohi’s defensive stance in Parliament on May 12 is unhelpful, saying that negative narratives about the NPA can be “dangerous” because the facts showed the NPA was improving.
Many South Africans share DA MP Glynnis Breytenbach’s dismay at the NPA’s “disappointing” handling of significant matters, and that it was “not unreasonable to expect progress” and “we are not seeing enough of it”.
Given that record and the nearing elections, who would bet on a tidy and timeous implementation of these recommendations?
The complex of national demons that factional ANC politics conjures up when it talks about fighting corruption drifts further away from what the rest of the country means when it demands that corrupt politicians leave public office and serve jail sentences for their crimes.
Nyembezi is a researcher, policy analyst and human rights activist
Cape Times