A+few+billion+reasons+to+question+ANC,+Brown,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 08 August 2006
=A few billion reasons to question ANC’s crusade=


 * Karima Brown**

THE ruling African National Congress (ANC) is a complex organisation.

It used to refer to itself as a “broad church” which assimilated both businessmen and Marxists, and still does. Yet its public appearance and pronouncements should not necessarily be confused with the reality and practice in the party.

This was demonstrated most clearly in the two lead stories in the past weekend’s Sunday Times and Sunday Independent. Both stories detailed the ANC’s complicated relationship with business and the party’s efforts to deal with the challenges that go with it.

Given government’s strident defence of the creation of a black elite, whose fortunes appear inextricably linked to President Thabo Mbeki’s tenure, how does one interpret the story in the Sunday Times: “ANC turns on fat-cat comrades”? According to the article, the party’s leadership is going to put the brakes on the empowerment of a select few and rein in the rampant accumulation within its ranks. The article said that the ANC was going to put a limit on how many times one individual would be allowed to be “empowered”. The piece came hot on the heels of Mbeki’s comments, during his recent Nelson Mandela lecture, warning of the dangers of unchecked individual wealth accumulation on the social cohesion of our society.

The answer to the reader’s dilemma lies in the fact that a story in the Sunday Independent detailed how the ANC had suckled on the largesse of slain mining magnate Brett Kebble.

So, despite the ruling party’s spin that it was trying to clean up its act, the ANC has become beholden to various “Kebbles” — businesspeople of varying degrees of shadiness who donate generously to the party’s coffers, some of whom are fronts to channel funds the party has no business accessing.

Lately, many in the ANC leadership have taken to making all the right noises about the growing corruption, crude and rampant accumulation of material wealth, and the abuse of state resources for personal gain. This sudden display of concern for “values” and “morals” on the part of the ruling party’s bigwigs happens as government continues to pursue economic policies and practices that spawn this corrupt and debilitating political culture.

It’s a moot point that the overwhelming majority of members of the ANC’s national executive committee, and key ANC provincial and local government officials, have become big business players, some even ranking as SA’s wealthiest men and women. This reality can never really be separated from the culture of accumulation at all costs Mbeki pointed to in his Mandela lecture. To do so reduces the lecture to nothing but hypocritical sophistry.

How do you explain that a former government minister and a former provincial premier, who each left public service only two years ago, are now rich enough to rank as the 64th and 65th richest South Africans? Or that another former premier is now rich from a black economic empowerment deal signed with De Beers, which is by far the most important economic player in the province he governed until 2004? Or the former director-general who became a multimillionaire by buying a stake in the parastatal he almost single-handedly privatised?

This kind of “empowerment” has ushered in a tiny clique of former politicians and state officials eager to get rich quick, many with nothing to offer but their blackness and the proximity to political power and influence. This crowd, we were told, operated under a just cause to “deracialise” SA’s economy and “transform” it.

Mbeki helped them amass personal wealth by peddling the fallacy of a “patriotic bourgeoisie” as a prerequisite to greater equality. This falsehood provided the cover for the destruction of the pro-poor outlook and policies that characterised the ANC just after 1994. The Mbeki instant millionaires have done little to transform the values of our economy, content to accumulate and continue, or deepen, the policies that degraded millions of black South Africans workers during apartheid.

But economic cronyism exerts a heavy price, and there is evidence everywhere that Mbeki’s ANC is reaping the whirlwind of its headlong rush to embrace capitalism. Even inside this small elite, everyone does not benefit equally. The fallout between newly rich ANC elites has undermined organisational cohesion. Their intervention in the party’s succession challenge has been all but destructive as various business interests attempt to “buy” ANC factions. As Mbeki and government have belatedly realised, their new value system has supplanted human solidarity and imperilled social cohesion, even among the poor.

Mbeki made it a stated goal of his presidency to create a black elite. But the question remains: should a government create wealth or an elite?


 * Brown is political editor.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A247148**

790 words