Will America have its Zondo moment?

Blink and you might miss it among the Covid-19 resurgences, debt downgrades, and grassroots support for Zuma and his henchmen.

But as we end 2020, Mzansi seems, against all odds, to be heading for a kind of closure.

In March, the Zondo Commission wraps up its long-running revelations of Gupta plots, banknotes stuffed into Louis Vuitton handbags and sacks of unused cement, slowly crumbling into the Free State soil.

And although we still can’t rule out a skebenga-in-the-hole, finish-line comeback, the decision of the ANC Integrity Committee that Secretary-General Ace Magashule should step aside from his job while he faces corruption charges is encouraging, as is the news that Zuma himself will likely be ordered by the Constitutional Court to testify.

Meanwhile, here in iMelika, tongues and keyboards are atwitter with the possibility that our own outgoing president may soon face legal charges.

Ideologically, of course, Trump and the Zuma faction of the ANC could not be more different. For arch-capitalist Trump, communist China cooked up the coronavirus, while Hugo Chavez reached back from the grave to rig American voting machines.

By contrast, at the top of Zuma’s hate list are “white monopoly capital” and “apartheid spies”.

But beneath this, the two recently dethroned figures share an awful lot: the conflation of individual and national interests; a love of conspiracy theories; a knack for spinning accountability as persecution; even a string of disturbingly similar sexual assault allegations.

Zuma’s corruption will be familiar to Daily Maverick readers, thanks to this publication’s extensive investigations. Trump’s likely prosecutable misdeeds, on the other hand, fall into five broad categories.

First is tax fraud, under investigation by New York State and audit by the federal Internal Revenue Service. Here, the controversy mostly surrounds overblown consulting fees, including some apparently paid to Ivanka Trump. The New York Times recently revealed that by claiming suspiciously sweeping expenses as losses, Trump, a billionaire, paid $750 or less in income tax for 10 of the past 15 years.

Next comes bank fraud, presently being explored by the Manhattan District Attorney. The issue here is whether Trump exaggerated his assets in an effort to get more favourable interest rates from private banks.

Third, bribery and/or campaign finance. Think of Michael Cohen, inappropriately using campaign donations from struggling Appalachian coal miners to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels.

Fourth and perhaps most gravely, obstruction of justice. This was the focus of the Mueller investigation, perhaps the closest America has come to a moment comparable to the delivery of the game-changing Madonsela report on State Capture. Mueller famously failed to recommend charges against Trump, who enjoys immunity as a sitting president. But he laid out a detailed trail of evidence for either Congress or for a future Department of Justice.

Last but not least, there is a whole series of failures of government that might also constitute violations, depending on how prosecutors looked at them: possible criminal negligence, in knowingly downplaying a dangerous pandemic; child abuse or psychological torture, via the government’s policy of separating parents from children at the border; sedition when an elected leader calls for resistance against the electoral system.

In the face of such extensive rule-breaking, what might an incoming Biden/Harris administration focus on?

Biden will face constraints that will again seem deeply familiar to South Africans. Just as Ramaphosa wants to avoid dividing the ANC, so Biden will want to try to bring together a fractured nation. Just as the South African Cabinet longs to have a chance to discuss restoring jobs and fixing education rather than rehashing the horrors of the Zuma era, so Biden fears having his administration defined by his predecessor.

Such large-scale public investigations seem essential, given both the gravity of the administration’s abuses and the disturbing track record of Obama’s “forward-looking” policy in relation to the Bush Administration’s torture programmes.