We can't afford Nkandla fatigue

President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla residence in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla residence in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

Published Jul 24, 2015

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By giving up on the Nkandla story, we will endorse rampant corruption, poor governance and collusion, writes Eusebius McKaiser.

 Some people think that we should stop demanding that president Jacob Zuma should #PayBackTheMoney. We apparently spend way too much time on Nkandla as a news item, and we do so at the expense of other important political, social and economic issues. It is not that Nkandlagate doesn’t matter, but that it is a tactical error to overinvest our energies in it. Or so they claim.

They essentially plead, ‘Guys, we can either build this country without Zuma and Nkandla, or we can let white capitalist pigs enjoy luxury lives while we are gaaning aan about Nkandla until MaKhumalo’s chickens cackle with fear of being impounded by Thuli Madonsela!’

Yet there is an intimate connection between issues like corruption, economic growth, inequality, the rule of law, good governance, and Nkandlagate. The connection between Nkandla and a South Africa in which millions more live flourishing lives, cannot be so neatly disentangled, I’m afraid.

 

Nkandla and the economy

We need sustained levels of high economic growth that is conducive to job creation. Don’t give me brownie points for the truism in the previous sentence. Here is the consequence of that truth: Nkandla is a significant example of how we retard economic growth. Some people suffer so much needless and irresponsible Nkandla fatigue they even forget the amount of money we are talking about here.

Some R246 million rand of our money was wasted on Nkandla, including some spectacularly poor craftsmanship we now know of after an oversight visit to the area this past week showed some rural infrastructure with Sandton price tags. This is corruption. It is theft. It is also not a crime that is victimless. Think about the opportunity cost of this misspending; in other words, think about what the same money could have done to contribute towards the economic inactivity that those with Nkandla fatigue think we do not care sufficiently for.

Well, for starters, sustained levels of high economic growth require culturally agile workers who are well-educated to conquer the knowledge economy, traverse the global village, invest locally and start new corporates that absorb the unemployed millions. Those kinds of citizens, in turn, are produced by schools that have textbooks, classrooms that are made of structures that can withstand torrential rain, public transportation and feeding schemes that can ensure learners, on full stomach, get to school every day, and public servants are well paid and incentivised to be excellent educators and role-models to the children we entrust to them, children who will become the economic agents we dream of.

Enters Nkandlagate. With R246 million you cannot solve the entire value chain of challenges in education – let alone in other areas of society that need fixing, maintenance and upskilling, like the SMME sector, say – but the wasted money sets back those projects, and directly impoverishes black people and keeps many who are already poor permanent objects of charitable pity. The message of Nkandla, and its effect, is that this state is not a serious partner in the economic growth and anti-corruption dialogue. So if you stop caring about Nkandla, and holding the culprits responsible, then in effect you lower your expectations of what the state ought to do, and not do, with our money. That is self-defeating, irresponsible, and certainly not what future generations would be proud of it.

She who cares about rooting out corruption and directing state expenditure to activities conducive to economic growth, must not stop caring about Nkandla being in the news. Stay with the story.

 

Nkandla and the rule of law

If human beings were virtuous, there would be no need for complex legal systems. At most we’d need a couple of functional rules to get along, and that would suffice. But human beings are deeply flawed creatures – as awesome as we can also be – and so an entire branch of government, the judiciary, is a necessary social nuisance because it helps to stop anarchy, and mitigates the effects of anarchy when we are nasty to each other anyway.

Nkandlagate is an example of nasty behaviour. As the Public Protector, an institution that exists in virtue of Chapter 9 of the constitution, has found, the president benefited unduly from the expenditures at Nkandla and must pay back some money in light of this undue benefiting. A court of law has now told us that, although the Public Protector isn’t a court of law, her opinion is not as unimportant as mine or Koos van der Merwe’s around the braai in Bloemfontein.

I actually dig the way a lower court has handled this, and hope eventually the constitutional court confirms this view but also tightens the language so that it is clearer and more action-guiding: unless someone can offer ‘cogent reasons’ for not implementing the Public Protector’s recommendations, they must implement what she says. That’s sensible isn’t it? If this body is constitutionally created, then we intended it to have teeth. But since it is not a court of law, we can’t make the recommendations as obligatory as court judgments. The perfect compromise is to shift a burden to the person fingered – call him Jacob Zuma, for example – to provide ‘cogent reasons’ to ignore the Public Protector.

So far the president has ignored her recommendations and not offered any reasons, persuasive or unconvincing, for why he is ignoring her recommendations. Outsourcing that legal burden to a sweat-drenched person you appointed to your cabinet isn’t an example of providing ‘cogent reasons’ for nor implementing the recommendations of the Public Protector.

This, in turn, means that Number 1 is role-modelling a wicked lesson, ‘The constitution, and court judgments, can be ignored, my people! Do as you please, like asking a buddy of yours – call him Mr Nhleko – whether you need to listen to that woman called Thuli! Thixo wase George Koch!’

So, if you understand the link between the rule of law, and a stable democracy, then you cannot get Nkandla fatigue. That is irresponsible. Equality before the law, and law-abiding behaviour, is as obligatory for you and me as it is for the president.

 

Concluding thoughts

Economic democracy is a concept that has not taken root in our public discourse nor in our unequal lives. Whites still own a disproportionate amount of assets, and are disproportionately wealthy compared to black people. That’s an injustice that should be attended to, yesteryear already.

But we cannot let black politicians off the hook just because we have beef with white monopoly capital. Here’s the connection between these phenomena: Corruption happens when people collude with each other to benefit unlawfully. The fact that there’s been no trickle-down to the masses from BEE and affirmative action generally is because many white capitalists throw bread slices at a few politically connected black elite and they essentially become glued together in comprador camaraderie.

Nkandla represents the evolution of these corrupt networks. Now we have black politicians and black business folk reproducing what white capitalists and a few black business folk have been doing all along. They co-operate to feed from the trough instead of caring about spreading economic opportunities fairly and equitably. A couple of people involved in the various build programmes in Nkandla will live in luxury while many struggling entrepreneurs lacking friends in low places will continue to hustle and not get into the economy.

The moral is simple: If you care about economic justice and you’re tired of only celebrating political freedom on the 27th of April every year, then you must stay with the Nkandla story. If we give up on the Nkandla story, we will endorse rampant corruption, poor governance, collusion between politicians and corporate (black and white), and low economic growth. Future generations will rightly condemn our cowardice.

* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.

** The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media.

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