Is+NEC+the+executive+board+of+ANC+Inc,+Vukani+Mde,+Weekender

Business Day Weekender, Johannesburg, 2006/08/12 12:00:00 AM
=Is NEC the executive board of ANC Inc?=


 * Vukani Mde**

IN THE 2000 elections that ushered in the US’s second Bush period, something happened whose long-term importance went relatively unnoticed. That year, the US congress became a millionaires’ club. For the first time in the country’s 200-year odd history as an electoral democracy, every member elected to congress was worth at least $1m, and a good number were worth a damn sight more. If you consider that there are 535 people elected to the US congress — counting both the house of representatives and the senate — that’s a combined net worth of half a billion dollars (probably more) for the men and women who sit at the apex of the American political system.

These representatives of the American people also tended to make their millions in the same industries that contributed to their election campaigns.

We can guess what the effect of this development can be on the country’s democracy. For instance, it is probable that Bush’s aggressively conservative tax regime — deep cuts for the highest income earners, abolishing estate taxes and the like, all paid for by cuts in social security and the US’s overseas development budget — would have met with a bit more resistance from legislators who are not drawn exclusively from the nation’s highest income (and therefore highest tax) bracket. Instead, rich US legislators year after year have approved budgets that cut deeper into social programmes, reduced their own tax obligations to the state and increased military spend for a corrupt war in Iraq.

It is probable that SA will never get to the point where every nationally elected public representative is a millionaire. But that doesn’t matter, since under our electoral system, the real centre of power is not Parliament but the ruling party, which for the foreseeable future means the African National Congress (ANC).

And if we look inside the ANC, the signs are frankly not that good. Of the 66 members elected to the national executive committee, five are worth R1,5bn between them. The rest are not poverty-stricken either. It’s just that they’re not rich enough to make it onto the Sunday Times Rich List. I’ll bet my bottom dollar (I’m not on the NEC, so to me that’s still a lot) that the only NEC members who are not yet dollar millionaires are either plain crazy or sanctimonious communist scum.

The ruling party’s highest echelons are turning slowly but surely into the sort of cleverly disguised chamber of commerce that the US congress became in 2000.

And according to what the ANC itself keeps saying in its regular online broadsides against the left, this is a fact to be celebrated. What took the Americans two centuries to achieve, we will have in the bag by the end of the second decade of democracy. Forward to the victory of the National Democratic Revolution.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2177806**

=Our heads are in the sand=

WHILE briefing the media after the cabinet lekgotla, the president confessed he knew no one in government service who was “moonlighting”, or in any other way collecting dosh they shouldn’t be. “Certainly in the Presidency I know of no such case. Frank, do you?”

Frank didn’t.

I know a couple but the man didn’t ask me, and I’m the type who speaks only when spoken to.

Last month’s Noseweek magazine gives the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of John Hlophe. Mr Hlophe is the head of Umbilo Trust, which has a stake in Oasis Asset Management, a finance and investment company in the fairest Cape. Oasis pays Hlophe a R10000 monthly retainer for “expert legal advice”. Which is all very well, except that Hlophe is also judge-president of the Cape High Court, and does his extra work for Oasis without the required consent of the justice department.

Hlophe has expressed no desire to resign from the bench, and continues his Oasis work unimpeded. And for its part government shows no desire to impeach him.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2177807**

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