Mbeki got away with skipping question time and ministers routinely evaded censure

24 Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  Rand Daily Mail

YOU couldn‘t make it up. Peering at the world through chic European spectacles, shod in Italian shoes, chauffeured in a German car and the beneficiary of R25-million from a US-listed mining house, National Assembly Speaker Baleka Mbete assailed Economic Freedom Fighters leader Julius Malema — and for even worse than being a “cockroach”.

According to a report of her speech in North West last weekend, Mbete — the person mandated by the constitution to ensure his parliamentary rights — said proud anti-imperialist Malema was actually “working with some Western countries in their quest to take over South Africa”.



Malema, who sports an überexpensive Swiss Breitling watch and is hoofed in Gucci loafers, repaid this rhetoric in similarly debased currency in parliament on Tuesday. He accused President Jacob Zuma of referring a bill back to parliament because of pressure from Western companies.



Mbete‘s subsequent and welcome apology for her attack on Malema simply underpins the incompatibility of being, simultaneously, a top gun in the ANC leadership and the presumed protector of members‘ interests, including those in the opposition.



Thabo Mbeki

But in the midst of this inflammation of hypocrisy and rhetoric, spare a thought for the institution that these two polarising figures — and one-time allies — represent.

Before interrogating their roles in debasing parliament, we should in fact thank Malema and Mbete for highlighting two fundamental trends.

 Malema, more than any individual in the past dozen or more years, has reinvented parliament as the centre of the national discourse and attention. Mbete, in turn, has made blatant that which, before last Thursday‘s night of national shame, was done through back-door manoeuvring.

Certain signposts on parliament‘s downward road are illuminating.

First, under Thabo Mbeki the national legislature became, as I once described it, a “forum for non-debates and non-accountability”.

Mbeki got away with skipping question time and ministers routinely evaded censure for not answering questions because the executive amassed power outside of parliament and the opposition regarded itself as bound by the rules of the institution.

Respect for the office of the president was then absolute, and even I, the leader of the opposition to his administration, would stand up before and after Mbeki‘s speeches. He was the fortunate beneficiary of the mantle of his sainted predecessor, Nelson Mandela.

Also, despite his prickly personality, evasion of accountability, inflicting ruinous HIV/Aids policies on his people and green-lighting stolen elections in Zimbabwe, there was no stain on his personal conduct in matters of state.

Mbeki also helped to create, and presided over, a growing economy. Critical elements of civil society, from the press to the business community, therefore simply averted their gaze from the predations under way in parliament.

 

But it was during these post-Mandela years that parliament‘s rot began. Perhaps the greatest white-anting of the institution was hobbling parliament‘s quest to investigate the arms deal. In late 2001, the executive rewrote the damaging conclusions of the joint investigative task team into the affair, in the hand of the president‘s parliamentary enforcer, Essop Pahad.

 

This lessened its damning conclusions and protected the cabinet. But it damaged parliament. The infamous arms deal — the hard case that settled into bad parliamentary and political precedent — first detonated most of the institutional damage made plain in more recent times.

The first person who was convicted of corruption in this saga was Schabir Shaik, whose acts of corruption deeply implicated Mbeki‘s successor, Zuma. Zuma‘s escape from the coils of his own corruption charges, which haunt his presidency, hobbled parliament long before he assumed the highest office.

The 2001 strong-arming of parliamentary processes to protect the executive occurred, ironically, under the speakership of Dr Frene Ginwala. She otherwise provided a form of independence from the encroachment of the ruling party on the rights of opposition members and had, in the main, some regard for the rights and privileges of the institution over which she presided.

But even her impartiality and independence — rickety though they proved at that defining moment — were too much for the rampant presidency. After Mbeki‘s emphatic re-election in 2004, she was fired as speaker. Her replacement was Mbete, in her first of two terms as speaker.

By this time, the ANC no longer countenanced robust contestation by the opposition or even the occasional free-wheeling of its own members. During the Mandela era, frontline cabinet minister Joe Slovo had been able to question the necessity of the arms acquisition, and free-spirited ANC backbencher and singer Jennifer Ferguson could abstain on the abortion vote.

Now Mbete was joined in a quest for total control by the deeply militaristic Tony Yengeni, who was installed as the ANC‘s chief whip.

In this combination lay further seeds of decay. Question time was curtailed, follow-ups were limited and the speaker was accorded the right to “vet” questions to the president.

The speaker then defiled her office in 2006 by being at the front of the queue to wave Yengeni off to jail. He was the second political figure to be named, then convicted and imprisoned, for accepting an arms deal bribe. But the real stain on Mbete‘s office was that Yengeni had in fact been convicted of defrauding parliament, the very institution the speaker was entrusted to protect.

The next milepost on this slippery slope was “Travelgate”. In 2007, five years after the whistle was blown (and the whistle-blower victimised) 32 MPs received criminal convictions and sentences for cheating parliament, but the speaker allowed them to hold on to their parliamentary seats. The institution was now truly discredited.

Little surprise, then, that in 2007, when I vacated my parliamentary and political leadership, my successor, Helen Zille, declined to lead the main opposition party from parliament, choosing to do so from the City of Cape Town and later from the provincial legislature. Her decision both underlined and assisted the sidelining of the national legislature.

Enter Malema and the EFF, stage left, after last year‘s elections. Alongside 399 other MPs, Malema swore to uphold the rules embedded in the functioning of the legislature — but had, from day one, no intention of being bound by them.

No longer dealing with a rule-bound opposition force, the ANC realised that the old approach of back-door manoeuvring and the emollient and inclusive approach of Mbete‘s successor as speaker, Max Sisulu, would not suffice. Time to recall Mbete, now also ANC chairwoman, to fly the party flag and enforce its diktat from the speaker‘s throne.

Then the Nkandla bomb exploded. It was the gift that kept on giving to what was now, on this issue at least, a united opposition.

From his minor perch of just over 20 seats, Malema, aided by a report of the public protector, seized the moment. With just four words — “pay back the money” — he branded Zuma as an unaccountable and self-enriching politician. Untroubled by the mayhem he unleashed, Malema had captured the national spotlight.

Last Thursday night, before the state of the nation chaos unfolded before a now enthralled, possibly horrified, nation, an opposition MP asked a cabinet minister what he expected to happen. This was in the light of Malema‘s threat to demand the missing answers to the question he had attempted to ask of an unresponsive and, later, absent president.

 “Whatever else, the speech will go ahead,” was the reply given.

And so it did. But in the process the naked use of force, the illegal jamming of cellphone signals and the sight of a president suffering an acute form of political autism were made plain. The security state made its unattractive reappearance 25 years after the enforced departure of securocrat-in-chief PW Botha.

But this time the pushback was different, more diverse and much stronger.

No longer could the executive trample constitutional rights underfoot. Two court applications immediately ensued and are ongoing. The press gallery, in an unprecedented display of revulsion, rose in protest. The leader of the official opposition, Mmusi Maimane, found his true voice, perhaps for the first time.

His “a broken man presiding over a broken society” mantra was aimed at Zuma. But it probably resonates way beyond the opposition constituency.

The speaker remains in office but, even post-apology, is bereft of authority and legitimacy.

In a constitutional democracy, might does not equate with right.

Authority has to be coupled with principled persuasion.

In the debate this week, it seemed that all parties had pulled back from the brink. The presiding officers were at pains to make even-handed rulings, and Malema read out a speech of thudding dullness, but left his wrecking ball at home.

And, for the first time in many years, both the nation and the state were entirely focused on parliament. In the wreckage of recent events lie, hopefully, the seeds of renewal.

 * Leon was a member of parliament from 1989 to 2009 and leader of the official opposition from 1999 to 2007

This article first appeared in the Sunday Times

 

Zuma should take this oath: 'Above all, do no harm'

Amid the chaos of last week's state of the address, President Zuma rehashed old ideas that will do more harm than good to SA

 

19 Feb 2015 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  Rand Daily Mail

 

Look beyond, if you can, the violent distractions on display in Parliament last week. Ignore even the curious head-dress borrowed, it seems, from Hiawatha's cupboard, of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Even the laugh, or rictus, of our president will fade over time.

 

Drill down into the content of President Jacob Zuma's speech and you get a glimpse of the future, even though much of its language and imagery came from the past. There are parts of it which create much foreboding and which should cause as much concern about our economic prospects going forward as the din and clamour inside and outside Parliament last Thursday suggested about the failing health of our democracy.

 

Speaker Baleka Mbete should know that "cockroaches" are well-nigh indestructible, having been recorded as even surviving nuclear fallout. Zuma must equally know that even when regents thought they had divine gifts, King Canute could not turn back the tide. In modern economies in the tough, take-no-prisoners world in which we operate, and where real jobs are created and currencies pummelled, there is no room for wishful thinking or untested or, worse, disproved policies.

 

Yet buried in the text and the laundry list of measures outlined by Zuma last week we had plenty of what Gabriel García Márquez called "magical realism" on display.

 

Strangely, Zuma got bashed by the estimable Financial Mail when, in his charm offensive in Pretoria with journalists days before his speech, he was heard to complain that "technology was costing jobs". Never mind the fact that this is part of the parcel of blaming external conditions for the local state of our affairs; there is a profound truth in what Zuma articulated.

 

We live today in an "Uber on-demand economy". Harvard’s Prof Yochai Benkler described the changing world of work as follows: "They are the people formerly known as employees. In a broad range of service industries, workers who once drew a steady salary are cutting out the employer and plying their services direct to people who used to pay companies, rather than people, to meet their needs."

 

Or to use a well-cited example: a few years ago when Facebook (which did not exist a decade ago) bought photo-sharing site Instagram, it paid a whopping $1-billion for a company that employed only 13 people.

 

In the same year, Kodak, which at its height employed 145 000 people, went bankrupt. As The Economist notes, "the new economy is remarkably light on workers".

 

That's the scary world we live in and to which South Africa, a small economy, dependent on and buffeted by these forces, needs to accommodate itself, and not imagine Canute-like that it can reverse these tides.

 

But there was no following echo, or even recognition of this reality in the state of the nation speech. Indeed, the very script which Zuma and the South African delegation read with some apparent success to the World Economic Forum seems to have been discarded. In the Swiss Alps we proclaimed to investors that "South Africa was open for business", and cited the investor-certainty in the National Development Plan.

 

Back home, in the Sona speech, we seem to have slammed the door shut and reheated yesterday's announcement with the day-before-yesterday's ideas.

 

At the Mining Indaba, leading foreign investors indicated that mining companies were "sitting on their wallets" when it came to investing in our bedrock industry. Mineral Resources Minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi confessed that he had been ambushed by ministerial colleagues into reneging on a closely fought agreement with the local Chamber of Mines on the vexed issue of "gate prices" for local strategic minerals.

 

Instead, we are to enter the brave and state-imposed world of "development pricing". In effect it is an asset-grab, which even roused the normally shy Chamber of Mines to declare this will "break the back of the South African mining industry".

 

Zuma said not a word on this controversy. He spoke of mining as the "backbone of the economy" but simply ignored the fire lit by his own government to immolate it.

 

But he did offer further legislation to "promote worker rights" and to "regulate" the practices of "private employment agencies". All this is intended to "prevent the abuse of unsuspecting workseekers".

 

It will simply further remove our country from the reality of the world we are in, rather than the socialist utopia the ANC dreams to inhabit.

 

The speech also gave a half-nod against the madness of the tourist visa regime which threatens to choke the one growth industry which could supplant ageing and uncompetitive mining as a job-creator and nation-saver. It will be recalled that the new visa regulations were announced last year without a single study or pilot project.

 

Now Zuma tells us "we will prioritise a review" of them. I suppose putting the cart after the horse is better than disposing of the animal completely.

 

But just before this announcement, he proclaimed — without any evidence to motivate — that the government would ban foreign land ownership entirely and limit farm owners to 12 000ha. Why not 5 000 or 50 000 is not explained; nor is the likely benefit even alluded to at all. I can think of multiple harm in terms of crushing foreign investment and promoting food insecurity; these too are left unaddressed.

 

Presidents today, no less than divine-right kings of old can, despite their pomp, powers and privileges, in truth not do much to change the economic forces of life. But, as every good doctor knows, they should be bound by the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath: "Above all, do no harm."

 

This article was first published by The Times

 

Follow Tony Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

Government indifference to business elite puts us in peril

10 Dec 2014 | Tony Leon | Business Day

While Jooste and Bekker are fairly quiet about their political opinions, Rupert and Wiese are less so, writes Tony Leon

IN 1936, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, American Nobel literary laureate Ernest Hemingway mocked F Scott Fitzgerald’s apparent obsession with the super-rich. Fitzgerald had mused: "The very rich … are very different from you and me." Hemingway’s withering literary retort was: "Yes, they have more money."

Nearly 80 years later, over the past weekend, the Sunday Times published its own list of SA’s wealthiest billionaires. No doubt the names on it inspire similar sentiments among readers — from admiration to envy or, in the case of the revenue service facing diminishing returns, an itch to extract even more of their income for the needy fiscus.

I couldn’t help but muse that nearly 40 years ago, during military conscription, I shared a billet in Pretoria with the top name on the list, Ivan Glasenberg. But, alas, none of his later revealed business acumen rubbed off on his fellow conscripts.

The paucity of women and infrequency of black names on the list inspired a lot of necessary comment. But I rather thought that the response of one reader captured the essence of the issue: "What SA really needs is more billionaires", of whatever stripe.

The listing is inexact, but it does provide a snapshot of many of the local super rich and the companies they have built or in which they have huge holdings.

My second musing was about the town of Stellenbosch and its university. Doubtless there is a thesis waiting to be written about what it is about the waters there which incubated so many of the post-1994 business leadership success stories of this country. It was hardly written in the stars, that a quartet of Afrikaans-speaking men — Johann Rupert, Christo Wiese, Koos Bekker and Markus Jooste — would achieve such global, never mind South African, prominence within two decades. And each of them has some provenance with this small town.

Of course generalisations of this sort are also inexact. Other business achievers of recent note such as Stephen Saad, Patrice Motsepe and Adrian Gore, got their business smarts elsewhere. And of course, simply the fact that this foursome are Afrikaans-speaking residents of the Western Cape can be as misleading as bracketing together Jacob Zuma and Lindiwe Mazibuko on the basis that both are isiZulu-speaking.

But while Jooste and Bekker are fairly quiet about their political opinions, Rupert and Wiese are less so. In an interview in Rapport Wiese made a revealing disclosure. Recounting a conversation with Motsepe who expressed his dismay at the absence of most of "the rich list" at this year’s presidential inauguration, Wiese countered with the unanswerable: "Well, I wasn’t invited."

Since the past weekend also marked the first anniversary of the death of Nelson Mandela, Wiese’s omission from the current president’s guest list was striking given the enormous attention which Mandela lavished on the then business elite of SA, from invitations to everything, to constant rounds of telephone diplomacy with its leading members.

Perhaps 20 years later the government no longer feels the needs for such interaction, or does not enjoy the "noises off" comment some might offer.

Perhaps the wise dictum of former US secretary of state Colin Powell that "no leader’s office should be an echo chamber" where the only conversation amounts to a chorus of approval, has been discarded.

Rupert underlined this point, and made a lot of the recent political weather. At the annual meeting of his Remgro Group, he opined: "The leadership of the country, quite frankly, is becoming very hard to defend abroad. The biggest insult is that they don’t seem to care what we think." And in a bow to populism he added that this dialogue of the deaf was not just confined to business but extended to "people in the townships".

The headline-treatment for Rupert was not that his comment was extraordinary; it was the rarity of such public expression by a certifiable leader of the corporate elite.

It is a matter of record rather than conjecture that on reading such a comment, Mandela would have been on the phone to Rupert within a hour or two. Different times then and now.

Perhaps the lack of response from the governing elite to the challenge of leading members of the business elite is at one level to be welcomed. It is a matter of more recent record just how easily stung our rulers and masters are when criticised. Far less harsh criticism than Rupert’s jeremiad led to a stream of invective from African National Congress secretary-general Gwede Mantashe in January last year.

The rather anodyne First National Bank advertising campaign "You Can Help" was pulled when the voluble Mantashe described the bank and various mining companies as, variously, "unpatriotic", "self-hating" and "treating the country like visitors". More darkly, business as a whole was accused of bidding to "control the state". Given the current electricity blackouts and a host of other ailments affecting the delivery of basic services, many might only wish that the latter was the case.

If, in fact, either Wiese or Rupert controlled Eskom, past form suggests they would hardly have lavished bonuses and salaries of R60m on its top executives for this year’s performance. They would have been shown the door.

But the absence of official comment on the Rupert speech did not prevent the "troll brigade" from commenting. One particularly bone-headed response in the comment section of BDlive was instructive, and perhaps widely held. Khayazonke opined: "The man’s amnesia is amazing, perhaps he has forgotten that his empire was built by the evil apartheid corruption." Indeed Rupert is the scion of one of the most prominent families of the past era. But famously his father began his empire in the back of a garage with £10.

They were doubtless assisted by proximity to the past regime, but the Ruperts were hardly its praise singers. Indeed, on the death of Anton Rupert back in 2006, then president Thabo Mbeki, also famously over-sensitive to any criticism from big business, struck an unusual pose in his encomium for Rupert the elder. He eulogised him as being "inspired by the spirit of righteousness and justice". He also noted approvingly that during the darkest night of apartheid, in 1985, Rupert had warned: "Do not embalm the corpse of apartheid, bury it."

In Wiese’s case, the facts also point to an early opposition-mindedness, long before it became fashionable. In 1977 he stood (and duly lost) as a candidate for the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party.

Anyway, the more recent corporate success stories of Rupert and Wiese have had a global dimension in the far tougher stream of international waters than the smaller, more protected shoals of the local economy.

Neither these nor other "inconvenient truths" will prevent the crude stereotyping and stigma-labelling which so characterises and debases the current discourse. But a little basic research might help it along.

There are many reasons why the mighty engine of the US economy has roared back to life, the recent extent of which has surprised even the closest market watchers.

But one of a host of differentiating facts between Americans and South Africans other than the striking similarity that we both live in countries with dysfunctional politics, is noteworthy.

It is the splendid disregard which American business has for political leaders it dislikes or whom they think harm their corporate, or even their cultural, interests.

• Follow Leon on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA

 

 

Dear President Zuma, it's not too late to restore Parliament to its former

Tony Leon | 19 November 2014 | Original Publication:  Rand Daily Mail

When police stifle opinion in Parliament, the light of our hard-won freedom flickers

 

DEAR President Jacob Zuma, last Thursday night, riot police entered the National Assembly to eject a member of Parliament who had called you “the greatest thief in the world”.

At the time, you were on the other side of the world in Brisbane, Australia.

Doubtless this grave insult to your office and dignity was deeply offensive. But your absence from these shores was because you were attending the G20 summit, the gathering of the leaders of the world’s most significant economic countries.

We are the only African member of this global club of the good and the great. Nigeria now has double our GDP, so we are no longer the continent’s biggest economy.

But we are, certainly, the only African country that is both of economic significance and a full-blown democracy.

Jacob Zuma

This is not a matter of opinion. While our country has fallen, sometimes precipitously, down the global benchmarks that matter, from perceptions of corruption to the measurement of our economic competitiveness, we have maintained our democratic credentials.

 In January this year, Freedom House, the democracy rating agency which measures “Freedom in the World”, rated our country as “fully free”.

If you measure that against the 10 other emerging market economies who sat around the table last week with you, you will see what an achievement that is. Only Argentina, Brazil and India are in our company. Your colleagues leading China, Russia, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Turkey head countries which Freedom House rates as either “not free” or “partly free.”

But now that police enter the hallowed portals of Parliament to eject errant members and interfere with their rights, all bets are off, as they say in racing. It will be interesting, perhaps sobering, to see where Freedom House places us next year.

Your opposite number from Great Britain, David Cameron, might offer a sobering historical perspective. We derive many of our parliamentary conventions, not least the position and status of The Speaker, from Westminster, rightly called “The Mother of Parliaments”.

Scroll back around 370 years to January 1642 when the king of England, Charles 1, forced his way into parliament accompanied by 400 soldiers. They were attempting to arrest five members of the House on charges of treason. That invasion of the inner sanctum was resisted by the speaker of the day, William Lenthall. When the troops marched into parliament, and the king demanded to know where the famous five were, the speaker faced him down. He said to the all-powerful monarch: “May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.”

What speaker Lenthall was saying was simple and brave: he was a servant and protector of parliament and he would take on the mightiest force in the land to defend the institution. Of course, the events of that day led to two civil wars in England and, seven years later, Charles was beheaded as a public enemy by the triumphalist forces of parliament.

The speaker of our Parliament does not see herself as a defender of its interests, to put matters at their mildest. She could hardly do so, given the massive conflict of interest that goes to the heart of the matter: She is both speaker of Parliament and the chairman of the ruling party.

Mr President, you and I began democratic life in 1994 in different places. We were both members of minority parties. You were the leader of the ANC in KwaZulu- Natal, and while a member of its cabinet, your presence and participation in legislative proceedings was adjudicated by a party member from your then mortal enemy, speaker Inkosi Bonga Mdletshe of the Inkatha Freedom Party. But he gave you all the democratic space you needed back then.

I had fierce differences at the time with your party in the National Assembly, but my rights were protected by an ANC speaker of commendable independence, Dr Frene Ginwala. She allowed me freedom to speak and act and to contest matters, even though I led a party with just seven members.

You do not need to be a Steve Hofmeyr to know that our history did not begin in 1994. In fact, in your 2010 state of the nation speech, you specifically drew attention to the role played by one MP during the apartheid years. You said: “Let me acknowledge the role played by the late Mrs Helen Suzman. She was for a long time a lone voice in Parliament, calling for change.”

Yet by her acknowledgement, her voice would never have been heard were it not for the protection she was given by her political polar opposite, National Party speaker Henning Klopper. She recorded with gratitude: “Without his help I could not have functioned.”

It says a great deal about where we are now that far from protecting the interests of minorities, speaker Baleka Mbete is seen as their persecutor.

Mr President, you have enormous power. It was suggested at the weekend that events in Parliament last week were triggered by your demand that ANC MPs “Use their numbers to crush opposition”.

I sincerely hope this is not the case. But either way, may I sincerely suggest that you pause, think about history, think about our place in the world and pull back from the brink.

Yours sincerely.

 

 

 

Taxes roll in while all else in the public service fails. Ever ask why?

26 Oct 2014 | Tony Leon | Sunday Times

THERE were no laughs in Wednesday’s sombre medium-term budget speech by Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene. But, given its grim context and the pain inflicted on South Africa by the markets, it evoked the gallows humour of Samuel Johnson: “When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

The “fiscal space” in which government vanity projects can be indulged and hard choices can be ducked has disappeared. Nene donned the hair shirt — even if he dared not whisper the word “austerity” — although some of his more ideologically inclined colleagues seem committed to their bling ways.

Like a faded suntan, the sunny tales of the “development state”, 5% annual growth, “countercyclical spending” and “a good story to tell” have been replaced by the more frigid world of tax hikes and spending cuts.

 After Wednesday’s speech, I thought the following snapshot might be an accurate summary of the state we’re in, with a post office which can’t deliver letters but whose directors award themselves 25% pay rises; a dozen turnarounds at South African Airways which cannot fund its way and other delights of a failing state:

“These things are the result of rotten government. To this very day, the government is pouring money down rat holes, and the people know it. The police are underpaid, the hospitals understaffed, the roads are disintegrating, the people left to build shacks for themselves on stolen land; yet there is no end to the minister of finance’s demand for more money.”

Actually, this paragraph of vivid vitriol was penned on January 26 1992 by the then editor of this newspaper, Ken Owen, on the ills of the dying National Party government.

His words are a reminder today that it has never been the fate or luck of South Africa to enjoy sustained periods of good governance, whether the administration is National or African National.

A week ago, President Jacob Zuma underlined this point when he compared his “persecution” over Nkandla with the lack of criticism for the PW Botha airport in George, although one suspects the public benefit of the latter will outlive that of the former.

Zuma’s point of comparison is striking: when you set the bar at ankle height, even my dachshund can leap over it.

An antidote to our rather depressing economic situation was provided on the same day as Nene’s speech by the insightful, down-to-earth Investec boss Stephen Koseff. He reminded a Cape Town audience that the National Treasury and revenue service have immeasurably improved in the past 20 years, both in terms of performance and transparency.

He also provided a clue as to why taxes are so better collected, even though there is a R15-billion hole in revenues — a reflection on low growth and not a failure of collection: “When Pravin Gordhan was in charge he hired a bunch of old whitey CAs to help with the collection.”

So for our efficient and communist tax collector, now minister of local government and traditional affairs, pragmatism, not ideology, prevailed.

I was struck by this point about why the collection of taxes seems to be an ideology-free zone of admirable efficiency and not the dumping ground for the friends of the famous and the centre for semi-unemployable cadres that seem to be the hiring principles on the boards of so many failing state enterprises.

I found the answer buried in the pages of a remarkable book written in 2007 by Paul Collier, then director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. In a library of tomes about bad governance in poor countries and some useful solutions, The Bottom Billion stands out.

On the puzzle of good revenue collection in a sea of state dysfunctionality, he offers this insight: the function of raising tax revenue was taken out of the traditional civil service because there was no realistic prospect of making the traditional system work. But as to why so many governments in the developing world, along with South Africa, went for the radical option on revenue but not on service delivery, he says the answer is “depressingly obvious”.

“Governments benefit from the revenue, whereas ordinary people benefit from basic services.

“Governments were not prepared to let the traditional civil service continue to sabotage tax revenues, because governments themselves were the victims.

 

“They were prepared to leave basic service delivery unreformed because the governing elite got its services elsewhere.”

The FW de Klerk administration did not reform the revenue service, the ANC did. But De Klerk certainly reformed the political space back in 1990 because he alone, in comparison with his five NP predecessors, could both read the writing on the wall and not assume it was addressed to someone else.

His government had essentially run out of money and its ideology could no longer be sustained, let alone funded.

Now, 24, years later, the successor government is also running out of money. Here’s hoping this tight space leads to another “wonderful concentration of the mind”.

 • Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

 

The Big Reads: JZ's 'Groot Krokodil' tears

23 Oct 2014 | Tony Leon | The Times

Never mind those pesky "clever blacks" who so irritate His Excellency the President. We have our share of "clever whites" as well, both local and exported.

"Apparently in the land of the rising sun Zuma means 'running horse'"

Kevin Pietersen, the supremely talented batsman lost to these shores and from 2005 the key man in the English cricket team, has recently switched from on-field fame to retirement notoriety by dishing the changeroom dirt on his enemies in his team with his apparently explosive memoir, KP: The Autobiography.

But whatever his prowess in front of the wicket, he is apparently less nimble in a media interview. At the weekend he bagged the premier interview column in the Financial Times, whose "lunch with" series is the gold-standard platform for celebrities. Our Kev chose the restaurant for his interrogation with journalist Matthew Engel. Quite unselfconsciously he selected Zuma, which the sharp-elbowed Engel described as "contemporary Japanese almost opposite Harrods, but without anyone Japanese in sight. The waiters are English; the clients wealthy wanderers."

Apparently KP is not as quick with repartee as he is with the bat. The interviewer records: " 'Zuma'," I muse. "'So it's a KwaZulu-Natal restaurant?'

"It takes him time to remember South Africa's president.

" 'Oh, Jacob!' " Then he decides that's funny. He is not very hot on politics, including the politics of everyday life," Engel notes.

But we can be grateful for KP's restaurant selection as it led me straight to Google translate since, until then, I had no idea that Zuma had a Japanese provenance. Apparently in the land of the rising sun it means "running horse". This seemed very apt and localised since weekend reports suggest that our homegrown Zuma is running away from parliamentary questions, although he must have been relieved - in a universe of bad headlines - that the C word chosen by the Sunday Times was only "coward".

But both evasion of parliamentary interrogations (which, to be perfectly fair, the presidency describes as "grossly misleading") and unfair enrichment lead us back again to that once obscure KwaZulu-Natal village, now a byword for state-sponsored profligacy, Nkandla.

Since parliament has never had a proper presidential explanation for the R246-million expenditure there - either because of the tactics of disruption of the enfantes terribles of the Economic Freedom Fighters or some other undisclosed reason - we have to read the tea leaves elsewhere (perhaps this is appropriate since this president's tipple is nothing stronger than Rooibos tea).

Apparently the most powerful man in the land feels "persecuted" by the media over the expenses. On Sunday, he advised that "there was no outcry over an airport built in former president PW Botha's home town".

His reference to the airport at George is both accurate and instructive. Indeed, during the long tenure of the former strongman of apartheid and MP for George, a modern airport was built in his constituency. Doubtless, the identity of the local parliamentarian and consideration of the ease of his travel counted for a lot in green-lighting its construction. But 25 years after Botha's forced exit from public life and office, the airport still serves as a huge and necessary gateway for tourism into the southern Cape region, which long after the reign of Botha still attracts thousands of visitors. More than 600000 arrive there every year.

Any tourists visiting the former home of the "Groot Krokodil" in Wilderness might also be surprised by its modest scale, not the palace of splendour one might expect.

But this is really beside the point. Things have reached a pretty point when a post-apartheid democratic president uses as his standard of justification the excesses and outrages, or lack of them in this case, of the brutal and undemocratic system he and his party vowed to replace and improve upon.

The old struggle phrase "never again" seems to have been replaced by one that says "well, sometimes when in a corner, we will dust it off".

The PW Botha defence at least has some form, as they say in cricket. Less helpful to Zuma's cause was his invocation of geography the other day. He apparently shrugged off the mushroom clouds engulfing his administration when he suggested that corruption is a crime only in a "Western paradigm".

He might want to have a word at the next Brics summit with his opposite number in China, Xi Jinping. He doesn't have the inconvenience of being heckled by opposition MPs but, in the eastern corner of the world, he has unleashed a campaign against corruption described recently by The Economist "as the most sweeping for decades".

Since we apparently bow to China in matters of foreign policy, we might want to borrow domestically from this campaign, although in China the drive is apparently led by "party investigators and the feuding factions they serve".

We have no shortage of feuding ruling party factions in South Africa. But we are blessed with an independent public protector, one of the real gains of the post- Botha years. A pity we don't celebrate her work and not curse her existence, as some in the seats of power do.

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA

 

How much more abuse can the constitution take from Zuma?

31 August 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  Sunday Times

Our President’s manoeuvres are sailing ever closer to the wind

It is not clear what reading matter President Jacob Zuma’s Kremlin hosts provided for him at the Dacha where he rested during this week’s visit to Russia. The timing of the trip is doubtless a coincidence, but he certainly chose a useful moment to escape from local difficulties, ranging from an unbowed Public Protector, an uber- aggressive Economic Freedom Fighters’ leader and the smoking gun perhaps lurking in the spy tapes. 

But it is certain that Zuma was not given sight of the article which journalist Philip Stephens published recently in the Financial Times.  He had also gone to Moscow, but neither for a rest nor to nudge along unnecessary nuclear power station contracts.   Stephens went there to try to divine why Zuma’s host, President Vladimir Putin, was behaving as he has been these past months: annexing Crimea, arming  rebels in Eastern Ukraine, banning McDonalds hamburgers  and even eclipsing South Africa’s sclerotic  GDP growth which in Russia is likely this year to spiral down to zero percent.

Stephens quoted the aphorism of a local who explained Putin’s hostility to his neighbours and the West as being a case of “when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know.” Putin is not the last or first leader who, confronted by the unknown, seeks refuge in the familiar.

The South African presidency seems to have taken this Russian recipe and applied anabolic steroids to the formula. Perhaps not for nothing was Zuma’s pre-presidential legal approach, when escaping the coils of looming corruption charges,  dubbed the “Stalingrad strategy.” But combat by exhaustion, delay  and destruction is one thing when you are fingered for the criminal dock, and quite another  when you are the president charged with upholding and enforcing the constitution. President Richard Nixon tried much of the same thing during the imploding Watergate crisis.  But  he was undone by his own voice on a tape, not admittedly by the voices of others, as in the case of the local spy-tapes, which might or might not provide a rational basis for the non-prosecution of the president on the corruption charges which cleared Zuma’s path to the presidency.

But before any of that unspools after the Democratic Alliance’s victory in the Supreme Court of Appeal on Thursday, which could disprove the National Prosecuting Authority claim of a conspiracy against Zuma, and the springboard (or excuse depending on your viewpoint) for dropping the corruption charges, there is the matter of Nkandla, Parliament and the Public Protector.  Here matters are both, simultaneously, more   and less straightforward. It’s literally a matter of what she said and he didn’t say or do.

Thuli Madonsela in an explosive letter last weekend, and the origins for its appearance onto the front pages remains contested, stated very plainly that the President’s response to her report on Nkandla which required him to repay an undetermined amount for the costs of improving his private residence amounted, in essence, to a non-response and an evasion of its central findings.

Weary readers might recall that Zuma’s response was to instruct a subordinate, the minister of Police,  to determine his culpability for any of the costs. What she didn’t say, but which the author Upton Sinclair once famously did, is that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” So, it’s an interesting stratagem to get a minister who enjoys the perks and privileges of office to decide whether the person, on whom his continuance in high office solely depends, needs to pay back multiple amounts of money.

But Madonsela actually went further; she suggested not only might this be a bad idea, but in fact it was ‘illegal’ since it conferred on the minister powers which he did not have and which usurped the powers of the court, the only institution which could review her findings. Second-guessing by a cabinet minister, in other words, is not just poor form but is, on her interpretation, unconstitutional. 

Naturally the African National Congress launched a ‘fight back’, by labelling her response to the president’s non-response as “undermining parliament”, pursuing a ‘personal matter’ and ‘playing to the gallery’ among other sins. Madonsela in response stated that this was a direct assault on her office and independence in violation of the constitution which proscribes any interference in the functioning of her office.

At this stage in proceedings, including the EFF’s interruption of proceedings in parliament two Thursdays ago, we might well ask the essential question: how much more damage can the constitutional instruments designed to combat corruption and rein in the abuse of office withstand, especially from those charged with protecting them?

Long ago, and not in Russia, but from its nemesis ,the United States, ,a famous, independent  voice of warning  sounded in a dissenting judgment against the encroachment of the state pursuing improper  ends . In 1928,  Justice Louis Brandeis wrote,  “Our government…teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”

Wise and prophetic words in America then and for South Africa right now.

 

 

No Gupta-style reception for Clinton on SA visit

01 Jul 2014 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:  BDlive

Giving the green light to the Guptas is apparently more easily accomplished than accommodating Clinton, who has an even-money chance of being the next leader of the free world, writes Tony Leon

HARRY Truman, the essentially self-educated, plain-spoken and hugely significant US president at the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Cold War, observed: "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."

He certainly practised what he preached and in his spare time, besides playing competitive poker, he read ferociously, both biographies and history. His opposite number at the Kremlin, Joseph Stalin, in between murderous purges and directing (or interfering) in the military defence of the Soviet Union was an autodidact of note. Even on the eve of the German invasion of his country, he was apparently reading military history, with his notes recorded in bold crayon.

Today’s leadership is cut from a different cloth and has to surf the age of instant communication, where blogging, Facebooking and tweeting, not to mention the "selfie", crowd out more contemplative pursuits.

And, in the words of another intellectual leader of note, Francois Mitterrand of France: "If you want history to remember you well, make sure that you write it yourself."

Recently retired US secretary of state Hillary Clinton practises both pursuits and, while her reading list is formidable, her autobiographies are driven by two impulses: money (she received more than $22m in advances for both her memoirs) and to advance her political career. She is today the favourite for the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 2016. Her book Living History did not help secure her the nomination in 2008, but it certainly added to her bank balance. Her latest offering, Hard Choices, hit the shelves last month, to a less than ecstatic critical reception. The Financial Times, for example, sniffed: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that presidential hopefuls must show their earnestness by writing crushingly dull books. Anything interesting would jeopardise their prospects. Hillary Clinton’s memoir is no exception."

The Economist was equally crushing in its review: "Earnest, dull and self-serving all at the same time … The memoir has the cautious, poll-tested feel of a campaign speech."

But there are some singular exceptions in this 656-page doorstopper and one of them relates to SA. To be sure, Clinton spends a few pages paying exemplary acknowledgement to her encounters with Nelson Mandela, not a difficult or diplomatic feat. But she opens up with far more candour when it comes to SA’s contemporary leadership.

Clinton, who has an even-money chance of being the next leader of the free world, writes: "In some instances, SA could be a frustrating partner … Presidents (Thabo) Mbeki and (Jacob) Zuma wanted to be taken seriously on the world stage. That’s what we wanted too … But respect comes from taking responsibility and sometimes it was difficult to interpret the reasons behind government actions."

She then relates an extraordinary and hitherto unrevealed back story of her last visit to SA in August 2012. Bear in mind that this was nine months before the Gupta wedding saga unfolded on the apron of Air Force Base Waterkloof — the difference in the reception for the wedding party and the then US secretary of state’s party is very telling.

In an incident which clearly still rankles, Clinton notes: "In August 2012, the South Africans refused at the last minute on my final visit to allow my diplomatic security team to bring the weapons and vehicles they needed into the country. My plane sat on the tarmac in Malawi, waiting to hear how the negotiations unfolded … the matter was resolved, and we were finally able to take off."

Clinton then, perhaps archly, notes: "I was leading a delegation of American business leaders from FedEx, Chevron, Boeing, General Electric and other companies, who were looking to expand their investments in SA." Indeed, at the time of the Clinton visit, trade between the two countries was valued at about R220bn, and while China had by then overtaken other countries as SA’s largest trading partner, the US was by far SA’s largest export destination.

It is unclear from her narrative how far up or down the chain of local diplomatic command the decision to keep Clinton grounded in Malawi went. In my own lesser diplomatic experience, these matters are often more cock-up than conspiracy. Still, I can imagine some official or group of them delighting in the idea of cocking a snook at the emblematic leader of the world’s remaining hyperpower, heedless of the reputational damage caused to our sovereign. Giving the green light to the Gupta wedding party’s unorthodox landing arrangements, at the same air force base, is apparently more easily accomplished.

Less than two weeks ago, Zuma advised Parliament and the nation that the government will "embark on various measures and interventions to jump-start the economy" and particularly render SA more attractive to investors. Perhaps it might be worth taking a leaf out of Clinton’s book, so to speak.

• Leon is the author of Opposite Mandela (Jonathan Ball) Follow him on Twitter: @TonyLeonSA OR on Facebook: facebook.com/TonyLeonSA