The State Capture Inquiry, that propaganda parade fronted by Deputy Chief Justice Zondo (ha, ha, a charade you are) is very largely a project on behalf of the South African Communist Party.
That is, a number of the witnesses, and all of the ones with genuinely damaging things to say about the conduct of the South African government, are members of the Party who are repeating the story which the Party was putting about, in alliance with other corporate front organisations, from about 2015 on, although it had been implicit ever since the Mangaung ANC Conference.
The story being told is that a single family of capitalists, fortuitously all foreigners and Hindu at that, was responsible for all the corruption taking place in South Africa under the Zuma administration. This is obviously very politically convenient for the SACP, because they can thus claim that the disasters wrought by the Zuma administration were not to be blamed on the SACP, because the SACP did not know about the Guptas when they installed Zuma in power.
This is, thus, the “state capture” story; a narrative intended to distract public attention from the generally corrupt condition of the nation — in particular, the way in which the ruling class and especially the oligarchy serves to manipulate and control the government — by focussing on a few designated spots of such activity. Does the SACP know what it is doing, or has it simply been fooled into doing this, perhaps by believing that “one has to start somewhere”, or “half a loaf is better than nothing”. (Depends on the condition of the loaf, of course.)
One should note that the SACP allowed its leadership to be given lucrative positions in government in defiance of its own constitution (that is, before the constitution was deliberately changed so that SACP leaders could give themselves lucrative positions in government). This means that by the standards of the founders of the SACP, the SACP had already become corrupted. (Even if one discounts Blade Nzimande’s theft of a business donation to the Party, incidentally, what is the Party doing accepting business donations? It would seem likely that the SACP heavily depends for its survival on gifts of money from capitalists, which means that it cannot possibly be a socialist organisation.)
So it is hard to believe that the SACP is innocent in this whole affair, or that it is accidentally collaborating with big business in order to further the interests of big business.
The SACP has long had a history of taking very firm public stands within the Tripartite Alliance. For instance, when Thabo Mbeki was President and oversaw an economic austerity programme called “Growth, Employment and Redistribution”, the SACP took a very strong line against this, condemning it as an undemocratically imposed neoliberal project and accusing all of Thabo Mbeki’s allies within the ANC of being agents of capital — the “1996 class project”, it was called, referring to Mbeki’s rise to being Deputy President, from being second fiddle to the racist reactionary F W De Klerk.
Then again, when Thabo Mbeki was battling with the international drug companies to try to force them to reduce the price of antiretrovirals before he would permit them to be disseminated free to HIV sufferers, the SACP took a strong line that the drugs should be disseminated free regardless of the cost to the government, and that there could be no delay in this and no time wasted in haggling with the international drug companies which were at the time sponsoring a massive campaign to undermine Mbeki so as to secure themselves the gigantic profits which would accrue from a South African treatment campaign using AZT at the 1999 price.
When Thabo Mbeki was trying to prevent Jacob Zuma from becoming President of the ANC at Polokwane in 2007, the SACP supported Zuma, on the grounds that Zuma was a left-winger whereas Mbeki was a reactionary stooge of capital. At the time one of the most strident supporters of Zuma was the ANC Youth League, who called on Zuma supporters to endorse the concept of nationalising the mining industry.
The nationalisation of the “commanding heights of the economy”, as the British Labour Party put it way back in 1946, was an obvious step in the direction of socialism, but surprisingly the SACP came out against it. They declared that the Youth League was simply hoping to seize the mines in order to loot their profits and assets, and that nationalisation was a dangerous and immoderate act. What the SACP demanded was instead that the government should oversee and regulate the mining industry and, by using legal tools, ensure that the fruits of that industry should be distributed for the benefit of all.
Another, less important but still significant, thing backed by the SACP was the issue of tolls on the Gauteng freeways. These freeways were upgraded in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, and it had been agreed that this would be financed by a complex electronic tolling system, to be administered, naturally, by foreigners, and largely enriching them — essentially a stealth privatisation of the roads. Right-wing libertarian racists and trade unionists combined to criticise this, and the SACP endorsed this criticism.
These pre-Zuma stances were, of course, debatable, and a cynic might notice that they were all ways for the SACP to get favourable headlines in reactionary newspapers, and win kudos from ignorant international leftist celebrities, without actually committing itself to any positive policies; also, that the SACP’s stance in all these cases was actually endorsed by big business. Still, it was possible to see these as principled left-wing stands within the narrow framework of the SACP’s ideological position.
But then came the SACP-backed coup against Mbeki in 2008, and the rise of SACP members into posts where they could actually implement the policies which they had been clamouring for. To the cheers of the pharmaceutical industry’s front-men, SACP member Barbara Hogan was elevated to the position of Health Minister. In this post she did essentially nothing. Eventually a crisis arose; as a result of provincial budget mismanagement, the hospitals and clinics in the Free State began running out of antiretrovirals. This was the moment at which Hogan could show her commitment to serving the suffering HIV-ridden masses regardless of expense. Instead she pranced about in other provinces on pointless photo-opportunity hospital visits, as the Free State victims sickened and died. Eventually even Zuma could take no more and shifted her sideways into Public Enterprises, where she did considerable damage before being sacked altogether.
Meanwhile, SACP member Pravin Gordhan was elevated to the position of Minister of Finance. He was a lot more energetic than Hogan — he speedily imposed an austerity programme which was far more savage in its reduction of public spending than the decade-earlier GEAR had been. GEAR had been introduced during a period of economic boom (as Keynesian economics recommended), while Gordhan’s austerity was introduced during a period of slump (as nineteenth-century classical economics recommended). So Gordhan’s policies, unlike Mbeki’s, led to the steady collapse of the South African economy and particularly of state revenue (a process which was naturally blamed on the restructuring of SARS and ultimately on the Guptas).
Neither Hogan nor Gordhan were criticised by the SACP in any way even though both of them effectively repudiated the declared policy of the party. Instead, Hogan was married off to the senile Ahmed Kathrada so that she could manipulate him in his last years to attack the ANC and promote the interests of the SACP-favoured Raaphosa, while Gordhan was solidly supported by the SACP and became one of its key allies in promoting the interests of big business.
Eventually Zuma fell, and once again SACP members were rewarded for their support of corporate interests by being installed in Cabinet positions. Nzimande had previously distinguished himself by his contempt for students and his hostility to reducing university fees while he was Minister of Higher Education, a post from which he was removed because of his ineptitude and apparent corruption. Now Ramaphosa rewarded him with the lesser post of Transport Minister, in which position Nzimande rapidly concluded that e-tolls administered by foreigners were a good thing, and selling South African transport services to foreign corporate entities was a sensible idea. Naturally he was not criticised by the party for this.
A slightly more important post was the Ministry of Mineral Resources, in charge of mining, to which the SACP’s boss fixer (and former right-hand corruptionmaster of Zuma) Gwede Mantashe was elevated. Nobody would have expected him to nationalise anything. All the same, it was slightly surprising when he came forward to declare that the “Mining Charter”, which had been a political football for some time (partly intended to enrich a handful of black people in the Ramaphosa manner, partly intended to cosy up to trade unions by pretending to protect mineworkers from exploitation and ill-treatment) would henceforth not be implemented, just as the foreign-owned mining companies and their tame media outlets have been demanding. In other words, Mantashe was declaring that there was absolutely no need to oversee or regulate the mining industry, for the fruits of the land should properly accrue to some of the richest people in the world who happen to be sponsors of the SACP and, by implication, Mantashe’s pals.
So, putting it all together, the SACP is so heavily implicated in state capture in its own right — never mind the state capture carried out by the administration that it helped to install — that the idea of having the SACP testifying about the horrors of state capture could only have been dreamed up either by someone who is having a huge laugh at the expense of everyone in South Africa with an IQ above single figures and anyone who has any sense of human decency at all, or by someone who is mechanically devoted to making use of the most corrupt people in the nation to cover up for the corruption of all the other corrupt people.
Which is actually rather clever, but hardly human either. The only question about it is how long the SACP can continue to exist under these conditions. The reptilian aliens who make up its leadership, of course, don’t care. But is there nobody else around who can notice that the Communist Party has no Communism and that the Party is no fun any more?