Cae Townn - "Stop the bloody nonsense.” These were Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s words last night as he reflected on difficulties facing the economy.
During a debate hosted by the Cape Chamber of Commerce, Gordhan said university fees for poor students could easily be covered, along with other pressures on the fiscus, if the country just stopped some of the corruption.
He said if coal and other government procurement was priced correctly and even a quarter of the corruption ended, there would be between R30 billion and R40bn more in the kitty.
“The way you do it is to stop the bloody nonsense,” Gordhan said in the debate, with journalist Justice Malala in Cape Town.
He was speaking on the eve of a 2pm deadline on Thursday for him to report to the Hawks’ head office for a warning statement.
This was in relation to alleged contraventions of intelligence laws and the Public Finance Management Act in connection with the creation of an alleged “rogue” intelligence unit at the South African Revenue Service.
Quoting political economist Francis Fukuyama, Gordhan said politics, power and rent-seeking would always go together.
The country needed to analyse “what is this thing called patronage”, Gordhan said.
Institutions needed to be protected and there had to be the right kind of leadership, with integrity, vision, the right values and culture.
“Mandela’s ANC wouldn’t tolerate what we’re talking about,” Gordhan said, to loud applause.
He said he still believed most ANC members were honest citizens who wanted it to play the role in society it had for 104 years. But it would need to take on the challenges Malala had raised about the state of decay in the organisation, which had also been recognised by secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe.
In closing his speech, Gordhan read out a statement responding to the letter from the Hawks demanding his presence, saying he would not be going because he had been advised the charges had no basis in law.
“I have a job to do in a difficult economic environment and serve South Africa as best I can,” Gordhan said. “Let me do my job.”
Gordhan has received the backing of Business Leadership SA, which in an open letter to President Zuma said the probe of Gordhan lacked any legitimacy or credibility and his possible arrest threatened all progress made by the country in the past eight months.
“It is shocking that our national collective effort to avoid a ratings downgrade and to restore inclusive economic growth is now being so insidiously subverted.
“If this sinister behaviour is allowed to continue, the consequences will be devastating for our economy, and will fatally undermine our national efforts to address poverty, inequality, and unemployment,” the board of BLSA said. It added that the country “stands once more on the edge of the abyss”.
“We urge you to act to preserve the unity and progress we have achieved since December by ensuring an end to the harassment, intimidation, and undermining of the leadership of our most important economic governance institutions.”
Former finance minister, Trevor Manuel, said the Sars unit at the centre of the allegations against Gordhan and other former officials of the revenue service was established in the letter and spirit of the law.
Manuel said the Hawks were threatening the unity of the state and accused Zuma of failing to hold organs of state together in terms of the principle of co-operative governance. It was “unseemly” of the Hawks to make pronouncements on ministers, he said.
Further civil society support for the Sars leadership was expected to be on display this morning, when Judge Johan Kriegler, advocate George Bizos and the Helen Suzman Foundation were to accompany former deputy commissioner, Ivan Pillay, when he reported to the Hawks at 9am.
In their letter to the Hawks, Gordhan’s lawyers point out that the allegation that he facilitated the creation of a unit which gathered intelligence contrary to section 3 of the National Strategic Intelligence Act 39 of 1994 is unfounded in law as the section did not apply to Sars.
Section 3(1) applied only to departments of state that were required by law to perform functions “with regard to the security of the republic or the combating of any threat to the security of the republic”, Gordhan’s lawyers say.
“Sars is not such a department. It was never engaged in national security matters. It was accordingly not subject to the prohibition in section 3(1).”
The section also applied only to intelligence about any threat or potential threat to the national security and stability of the republic, while the Sars unit had never engaged in the gathering of intelligence of this kind.
In his own statement in response to the Hawks letter, Gordhan said the Sars unit was part of the broader enforcement division, which had enforcement capabilities similar to those required in any tax and customs administration in the world.
DA spokesman on finance, David Maynier, has also come out in full support of Gordhan not reporting to the Hawks, saying it “marks the beginning of a fight back by Minister Gordhan against President Zuma’s witch-hunt, levelled against the very man who holds the keys to the nation’s public purse – the National Treasury”.
“Zuma knows his days are swiftly coming to an end – both as president of the ANC and of the country – and has now begun to accelerate his personal project of state capture, in order to centralise power and get his hands on the people’s money to continue enriching himself and his band of cronies,” Maynier said.