We have now begun our descent: How to Stop South Africa losing its way

JUSTICE MALALA is one of South Africa’s most well-known political commentators. He was founding editor of ThisDay newspaper, publisher of the Sowetan and Sunday World, and Sunday Times correspondent in London and New York. He has been published internationally and writes weekly columns in The Times and the Financial Mail. He presents a weekly TV talk show, The Justice Factor.

JUSTICE MALALA

We have now begun

our descent

How to Stop South Africa

Losing its Way

Jonathan Ball Publishers

Johannesburg & Cape Town

Prologue

I am angry. I am furious. Because I never thought it would happen to us. I never thought we would be having such a conversation. Not us, not the rainbow nation that defied doomsayers and suckled and nurtured a fragile democracy into life for its children. I never thought it would happen to us, this relentless decline, the flirtation with a leap over the cliff.

How could it? How can it? We are the children of Nelson Mandela, after all. We are the country that gave birth to the first liberation movement on the African continent, the African National Congress (ANC).¹ We wrote the world’s most admired Constitution,² a document held up as an example by progressive forces around the globe.

It would never happen to us, I said, as I tucked into a bowl of pepper soup in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2004, surrounded by some of the most astute Nigerians of my generation. At our table of eight were bankers, editors, accountants and a government official. I spoke confidently of my faith in my people, in my country, and in my country’s leaders, to break the narrative of Africa as a continent of post-colonial plunder, poverty, dictatorship and war.

They laughed. They laughed good-naturedly, as if I was a child, as if I was yet to learn the ways of the world. They all laughed, all of them, without exception.

That sweltering afternoon in Lagos, when I joshed with my colleagues and told them South Africa would never descend into the anarchy and decrepitude and chaos that made me love and hate their city, came back to me on the evening of 12 February 2015. South Africa’s democracy was being stolen, and the slow decline we had suffered over the previous seven years was coming to a head.

The young firebrand Julius Malema, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and former president of the ANC Youth League, had made it clear in the run-up to the State of the Nation Address, to be delivered by President Jacob Zuma, that he would demand that the President answer to the charge of theft.³ Zuma’s administration had, over the previous six years, spent R246 million in public money on improvements to the President’s vast house in his home village of Nkandla, in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

The Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, had been scathing in her findings about the house. Her report found that Zuma had disproportionately benefited from the upgrades; that the work on his home was ‘exorbitant’; that he had failed to stop the spiralling costs; and that he had allowed the building of a visitors’ centre, cattle kraal and chicken run, swimming pool and amphitheatre under the guise of ‘security upgrades’, which these were clearly not.⁴

This was what Malema was challenging Zuma about in Parliament. Both the EFF and the rest of the opposition wanted Zuma to pay back the money he owed to South Africans for the building of this gaudy palace in the midst of the poverty and despair of Nkandla.

As the respected economist Nazmeera Moola has pointed out, the Nkandla Local Municipality ‘has 114 416 people living within its jurisdiction. Only 32 per cent of the 22 463 dwellings in the municipality are classified as formal. Only 16.7 per cent have piped water inside their dwelling, 8.1 per cent have toilets connected to a sewerage system and 7.8 per cent have their garbage collected by the council.’⁵

Here, in this sea of poverty, is where our government spends R246 million on one man. It reminds me of the Zairean kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko. At the height of his excesses in the 1980s, Mobutu built an airport next to his palace at Gbadolite with a runway long enough to accommodate the Concorde, so he could hop over to Paris for a quick shop.⁶

And so Malema arrived at a tense Parliament in Cape Town, having declared his intention to ensure that Zuma answer what can be distilled into this simple question: ‘When will the President pay back the money spent on non-essential security items at his Nkandla home?’

A security blanket had been thrown over proceedings, with every single person who made it into the parliamentary precinct on the day subjected to pre-screening by intelligence services and rigorous security checks.⁷ At the start of proceedings, mysterious men and women in white shirts were seen outside the parliamentary chamber. No official would say who they were and why they were there. You would have thought South Africa had received credible information about a threatened terrorist attack, but the threat was that an opposition politician wanted to ask the sitting head of state a question. Just one question.

When proceedings were supposed to start, journalists realised that their mobile devices were jammed and they could not transmit messages to the outside world. The journalists and opposition parties began shouting: ‘Bring back the signal!’⁸ After several exchanges with irate opposition MPs, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Baleka Mbete, informed the chamber that the signal had been unscrambled. This was essentially an admission that the signal had been purposefully scrambled in the first place. Who ordered this? Why? The Minister of State Security was later to say that the cellphone signal had been jammed by mistake.⁹ If that was the case, how could it be unscrambled so quickly? Why was it unscrambled after he, David Mahlobo, had received a note from Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa and then left the chamber?

After that there was an argument when Malema’s party insisted that Zuma answer the question of when he would pay back the money spent on Nkandla. That was when Mbete ordered the mysterious figures in white shirts and black trousers to enter the room. Using their fists liberally, they removed the EFF MPs from the chamber. Several of the EFF MPs, including Malema, were bleeding. A female EFF MP suffered a broken jaw and spent days in hospital.¹⁰

This was the South African Parliament, where our revered Constitution – authored by men and women led by Cyril Ramaphosa, one of the men now sitting in the National Assembly – was adopted in 1997. In a speech at the adoption ceremony for the Constitution, symbolically held in Sharpeville, Gauteng, where 69 South Africans were murdered by apartheid police in March 1960, Ramaphosa had said: ‘Here, at Sharpeville, in Vereeniging, both powerful symbols of past relationships between South Africans, we are making a break with the past. A break with the pain, a break with betrayal. We are starting a new chapter.

‘Today marks the legal transition to a Constitution that represents the will of the overwhelming majority of the people of this country. It’s one law for one nation, a document that commits not only the government but every single one of us to the values that have been disregarded in the past – to human rights, fair, decent treatment for all, to democracy and government that is accountable to the people, to tolerance of our differences and appreciation of our common humanity.’¹¹

The events in Parliament on that day in February 2015 were the furthest we have ever been from that beautiful statement. Accountability, openness, democracy – all lay in tatters. South Africa’s democracy was being compromised in defence of one man: a leader around whom swirled allegations of corruption, lack of values, lethargy and failure to govern properly.

That was when I knew that South Africa had begun its descent into what my lunch colleagues in Lagos had joked about with me. In the years since 2009, when Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma ascended to the presidency of South Africa, we have gone backwards on every conceivable front. We are losing our way. The principles embodied by our founding fathers are under siege; the poor are treated with disdain; the powerful and politically connected are looting the coffers of the state; while the masses of our people are becoming increasingly desperate and have only government handouts to thank for their survival.

Under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, government debt was reduced from the disgraceful apartheid levels (52 per cent of GDP in 1994) to less than 30 per cent of GDP. Under Zuma it has ratcheted up dramatically to 45.9 per cent.¹² Unemployment is ticking up, while economic growth has deteriorated sharply since 2009. Statistics South Africa’s quarterly labour force survey found that the jobless rate rose to 26.4 per cent in the first three months of 2015 – the highest level in 11 years. In all, 8.7 million people are unemployed, if we include those who have given up looking for work.¹³

Gross domestic product grew by an annualised 1.3 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the first three months of 2015. That is worse than the miserable 1.5 per cent growth of 2014. Worse, though, is that GDP contracted an annualised 1.3 per cent from the first quarter of 2015. GDP growth has deteriorated steadily under Zuma: 3.6 per cent in 2011, 2.5 per cent in 2012, 1.9 per cent in 2013. The trend is set to continue up to 2017.¹⁴

Zuma was re-elected for a second term in May 2014, at exactly the same time as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At the time India’s inflation was running at 9 per cent and economic growth had slowed to less than 5 per cent. When Modi celebrated a year in office in 2015, inflation was down to 5 per cent, and the International Monetary Fund was forecasting that India’s economy would grow by 7.5 per cent in 2015. The same institution believes South Africa will struggle to achieve 2 per cent growth.

Unemployment is the single most dangerous issue facing South Africa today. It is creating a great mass of anger and frustration. As the young and hopeless watch Zuma and his cronies eat and ask for more from their mothers and fathers in taxes, rates, eTolls (highway tolls) and other charges, they begin to ask themselves: why, and for how long? Police minister Nathi Nhleko reported to Parliament in May 2015 that there were a staggering 14 700 incidents of unrest – community and service delivery protests – reported to the South African Police Service (SAPS) in the previous year.¹⁵

There will be howling from Zuma and his cronies at all these things I say. They will allege all sorts of things. They will accuse me – as they have accused every black person who dares to call them out on their looting – a coconut, a sellout, a tool of whites and of the West. To them I say: it is black people, my people, that you are betraying. It is black people who are unemployed, whose taxes you steal, whose lives you condemn to hopelessness and despair. It is black people who suffer when the institutions of state are rendered useless and cowed. It is black people – who the Zuma administration claims to be working for – who bear the brunt of the failure of the police, the courts, the state, to deliver on their mandates. These people didn’t fight and defeat apartheid for this. They didn’t fight and defeat apartheid to see their leaders feed at the trough while thousands go to bed hungry and cold. If they did, then indeed I am a sellout. Then indeed every man and woman of conscience who stands up against the spread of corruption and the betrayal of the liberation ethos espoused by Mandela and others is a sellout.

Are we a failed state? No, not by a long shot. Are we a Syria or an Eritrea or a Libya? Not at all. We have a beautiful country, a peace that defies belief and a people committed to the democracy we have painstakingly built over 21 years. That is why we need to take heed of the warning lights that are flashing.

Failure, disaster and collapse can arrive very quickly. Sometimes it can take years of the drip-drip effect, of small things going wrong and being left unfixed. One day you look around and realise that everything is broken, that your country has been stolen. That is what I fear the Zuma presidency has been doing to South Africa since the man came to power in 2009.

The Zuma bus is taking us over the cliff. And if we stay quiet, if we don’t point out the sharp decline that he has brought about, both in the quality of the ANC’s leadership of society and in the quality of leadership in government, then we are laughing with the bus driver, the thief-in-chief from Nkandla.

What is going on? On the day the Public Protector comprehensively proved that a crime had been committed against the taxpayer over the building of Zuma’s palatial home, and that he had benefited unduly from this crime, he gave a speech in which he did not even see fit to mention her findings.

You see, he is not ashamed at all. He is not ashamed that he is exposed, that he is naked, that the world is pointing and laughing at him – and at us. He has no shame. Without this sense of shame, this acknowledgement of wrongdoing, he will sit in office and continue as if nothing is wrong. I believe that, in his warped view, the only thing that would lead to his being removed from office would be a jail sentence.

We are sliding from our high ideals into a free-for-all in which politicians are a law unto themselves and accountability is a word used only for PowerPoint presentations. Not a single member of the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) is prepared to raise their hand and say to Zuma: thus far, and no further. In the NEC, the rot is now endemic.

It is, of course, easy to point fingers and accuse Zuma and his cronies of all sorts of things. The truth is, they are not the only guilty party here. We are guilty too.

South Africans deserve these leaders. We deserve a Zuma, because we have rewarded him for his scandals: Guptagate, Khwezigate, Malawigate, the spy tapes, Schabir Shaik …

The list of scandals is long. Yet we chose the man at the heart of them all. Not just once. Twice.

The depressing part is that Zuma and the ‘leaders’ he has surrounded himself with are busy subverting our institutions of accountability and turning them into paper tigers. By the time they leave – for they shall – they will have done us a huge amount of damage. Think about the many once-respected institutions that, over the Zuma years, have become nothing but shadows of their former selves, with mostly puppets at the helm: the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the Hawks, the South African Revenue Service (Sars). And what about the collapse of the Scorpions, the attempts to subvert the judiciary, the hijacking of the National Intelligence Agency and of course the disgraceful violation of Parliament in February 2015 when police hammered the EFF’s MPs – despite the outcry when this happened for the first time in November 2014.

The problems we face are not insurmountable, though. Indeed, we are luckier than most in that our beautiful country can turn itself around quickly – if we move fast.

South Africa needs some serious, ethical, authentic, values-driven and dynamic leadership – from government, business and civil society – over the next few years. Without such leadership we shall lose a golden opportunity to take this country towards the prosperity, peace and pride that it sorely needs.

In the run-up to the 2009 elections many of us said that Zuma was not the right man for the job. He was compromised then, and his track record since 2009 proves that he is not the type of inclusive, principled or decisive leader that the country needs, and that our challenges demand. This is a challenge for the ANC to grapple with, but it is one that the electorate will decide for it if the party does not mend its ways. They will walk away from the party of Mandela sooner rather than later.

Zuma is a liability for the ANC. He is a liability for the country. He should do the right thing and go. He must go. South Africa cannot afford such a leader for the long, challenging period ahead to 2019, when the next general election will be held. I shudder to think of the damage we will have suffered by then.

The much-lauded former Minister in the Presidency, Trevor Manuel, and his impressive National Planning Commission produced a comprehensive set of recommendations, in the form of the National Development Plan (NDP), about how we can make South Africa a prosperous country, free of unemployment and homelessness, by 2030.¹⁶ The commission’s report will make many of us uncomfortable. Its analysis of our shortcomings is searing. Its honesty in pointing out our failures over the past 21 years is clinical and admirable, yet painful. Its proposals on how we get our education system, labour market, government and other spheres of society back to winning ways will require much hard work.

Key to all of it, however, is leadership. Since the NDP was adopted by Cabinet, very little of it has been implemented. We need leadership to implement some of the extremely tough measures that are called for in the report.

The problem goes further than Zuma. Ordinary citizens will have to get out of the slump of dependency that so many of us have fallen into. Trade unions will have to stomach the idea that things have to change, and that the unemployed are as important as the employed. Principals and teachers will have to accept that supervision of schools will be stepped up. Business will have to accept that, without ethical leadership and participation in South Africa as a corporate citizen, the profit motive alone is just not good enough.

It is bitter medicine, but it is medicine that we have to take. Reading the NDP document, it is clear that we could become a prosperous country within a relatively short period of time. But we need resolve at leadership level, we need non-partisanship, and we need to understand that this is the crossroads.

We can choose to be decisive in our leadership and walk the road Manuel and his commission have mapped out for this country. Or we can fall into the lazy thinking, the woolly policies, the selfish gestures, of the Zuma school of leadership. That way leads to entropy, chaos and collapse.

The warning lights are flashing. We need to wake up and smell the coffee. We are going down.

This book is an attempt to point out how Jacob Zuma and his cronies have stolen our democracy. They have infected us with poor governance and poorer values. I hope this book can help us get our democracy back. It is an attempt to show how we can put the nightmare years behind us and begin the tough task of giving jobs, water, education, housing and dignity to our people. At the end of the day, this is the urgent task that Mandela and Tambo and many others – the founding fathers of our democracy – were all about.

In his first speech to Parliament in 1994, Mandela set out exactly what it was the ANC-led government would seek to achieve: ‘My government’s commitment to create a people-centred society of liberty binds us to the pursuit of the goals of freedom from want, freedom from hunger, freedom from deprivation, freedom from ignorance, freedom from suppression and freedom from fear.’¹⁷

This is what we all want. The Zuma years have been the polar opposite. As Zwelinzima Vavi, the former secretary-general of Cosatu and a former ally of Zuma, said in 2010: ‘We’re headed for a predator state where a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas are increasingly using the state to get rich.’¹⁸

We are there now. We can still fix things before we hit rock bottom. But time is running out. We have now begun our descent.

PART ONE

The Way We Are Now

1

And So it Begins

‘Yeah, every night it’s the same old thing

Getting high, getting drunk, getting horny

At the Inn-Between, again.’

– Rodriguez, ‘A Most Disgusting Song’

My brother Ernest is reading Time magazine. It is the year 1991, a bright, hot, clear April day. He is 14 years old. He comes over to me, lolling on the one sofa in our family home, a corrugated-iron shack, and asks for the meaning of a word he is unfamiliar with.

We play around with the word, factotum, which he likes the sound of, and make examples of sentences in which it appears. Then we have a short discussion about Angola’s MPLA. Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, he tells me. That is what it stands for in Portuguese. I don’t know how good a leader José Eduardo dos Santos is, which is what Ernest wants to know, as he has lately heard about the Angolan president.

Then his friend Ndembeni rides into our yard on his bicycle. Ndembeni is two years older than Ernest. They are fast friends. Ernest gets onto the handlebars of the bicycle and they ride off, free as a pair of birds.

Two hours later my cousin Dan Malala’s son, also named Justice, comes running into our yard. He tells me that two teenagers have been hit by a bakkie down in Block A of our village of New Eersterus, just north of Pretoria, near where they live. He is not sure that it is Ernest and his friend. He says I must hurry.

I walk, in a daze, to the scene of the accident, a journey of 30 minutes. A large crowd has gathered. A man stands by the side of the road, holding his head in his hands. He is the driver.

It is Ernest who is lying on the side of the road. We put him in the back of the bakkie. I sit with him. I know he is dead, but we all pretend that there is hope. The driver, the man with his head in his hands, takes the wheel. An Indian doctor comes to the door at the hospital, Jubilee. He shakes his head.

‘He is dead,’ he says, his tone flat. Final.

Hospital orderlies take Ernest’s body to the morgue.

Both of Ndembeni’s legs are broken. He is in a coma for weeks. There are injuries to his head, his arms and his face. They did not see the bakkie coming. There is no police investigation.

The driver takes me back to our house. My mother is back from work at the nearby Catholic seminary. There are women sitting with her, surrounding her. They know. I tell them. They hold my mother down. Her weeping is silent. I don’t know what to do, what to hold.

Ernest was special.