Helen Zille is right: State Capture is not a Zuma thing — it’s a South Africa thing

We don’t often find ourselves agreeing with Helen Zille these days, but she really hit the nail on the head when she responded to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise to end State Capture by saying that “State Capture is not a Zuma thing”.

It almost goes without saying that the above soundbite was part of a wider attack on Ramaphosa and the ANC. On her Facebook page, Zille wrote: “State capture, through the ANC’s deployment committee, remains in full swing, under the Presidency of Cyril Ramaphosa. That is why I laughed out loud when I heard our President promise an end to ‘State Capture’ in the ANC’s January 8 statement. He clearly has no idea what the concept is.”

Here too Zille is at least half right. The flurry of post-Zumarian Covid corruption scandals has made it abundantly clear that there is no quick fix to our problems. As Zondo has shown, State Capture is both real and pervasive. On the other hand, we have to disagree with her assertion that Cyril doesn’t understand the concept of State Capture. Having served as deputy president under Zuma he should have a firmer grasp on the nuts and bolts of State Capture than any of us.

But we digress. What really bothers us about the DA’s gleeful attack on “cadre deployment” is the none-too-subtle implication that giving jobs to party loyalists is somehow an ANC invention. While Zille is right in questioning the practice, she is wrong in implying that what the ANC is doing is in any way new to South Africa.

On 7 January, Zille even went as far as tweeting: “If, under apartheid, it had been revealed, through the release of Broederbond minutes, that they hand-picked judges, it would have been a scandal of unimaginable proportions. There has now been a comparable revelation in our democracy. Barely a peep.”

As an ex-Rand Daily Mail journalist, Zille should be aware that the Broederbond didn’t keep minutes, and that the Broederbond-controlled Nats certainly did pack the courts, as Judge Dennis Davis put it, with judges “in their own political image”.

In the 1950s, the Nats also altered constitutional legislation through highly dubious means to wrest control of the senate. And although Verwoerd did launch a supposed investigation into the Broederbond’s activities, this utterly farcical inquiry was overseen by a National Party-appointed judge and by two high-ranking Broederbonders. Judge Raymond Zondo has done an infinitely more thorough and impartial job of exposing government failings than any apartheid-era commission of inquiry ever did.

Curiouser still, outrage against these apartheid actions was raised repeatedly in — you guessed it — the Rand Daily Mail. Although many of these events were before her time, the fact that Zille seems unaware of this history is a little odd. (We give a good account of what went down in our upcoming book on the history of “democracy” in South Africa, Spoilt Ballots.)

Students of history will know that the State Capture problem predates apartheid — by at least 250 years. Given Zille’s predilection for colonialism, it makes sense for her to gloss over the fact that State Capture — along with her much-loved “independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water etc” — is a European import. But this is the unvarnished truth.

While writing Rogues’ Gallery, a catalogue of 350 years of corruption in South Africa, we discovered that State Capture is a VOC thing, a British colonial thing, a ZAR thing, a homeland thing and an apartheid thing. The VOC, the British, Kruger, Rhodes, Botha, Smuts, Hertzog and the apartheid-era Nats all dallied in antidemocratic State Capture — with varying degrees of success. None of this makes ANC State Capture before, during and after Zuma any less deplorable. But it is wholly inaccurate to imply that the ANC invented South African State Capture.

But, as Zille should also be aware of, packing courts and capturing the state is no longer simply a local problem. The issues surrounding the appointment of judges to the US Supreme Court are a daily reminder that contemporary “democratic” political parties will, by their very nature, try to influence and select the judiciary in their own image. Globally, the scourge of recent democratic politics has been extreme partisanship and increasingly polarised ideologies. This has created a recipe for State Capture the world over.

South Africa under the ANC has in many ways been a testing ground for this new form of “democratic” partisan politics. Democracy is meant to be an open deliberative process, a political system of limits, of checks and balances, of the separation of powers. Can our country even be said to be a democracy where these in real terms do not exist? Where one party essentially decides who the judges are, who the Public Protector is, who is appointed to the SOEs?

Zille does have a point. But the question lingers: would any kind of change in government in South Africa alter this state of affairs? Perhaps one issue that Zille should sit down and chew on is that her newfound political stance — that of the “anti-woke” right — is, across the democratic world, currently engaged in very similar practices to those of the ANC. Just how the DA, with its ever-increasing ideological stance, will (if it ever gets its mittens on the real levers of power) distance itself from these non-democratic practices is not easy to say.

What might, however, help is if Zille and her fellow members in the DA look into our history and open the odd newspaper. There they will find that (a) State Capture is not an ANC thing… it’s a South Africa thing and (b) the politics she is aligning herself to is one that has disturbingly ANC-like undemocratic practices. DM