Richard Calland
Abuja Domestic airport, September 21. He sees me coming and, as I hand him my case, informs me that I must pay him 500 naira due to “excess weight”.
I point out that he has not yet actually weighed my case. He shrugs: “It’s too heavy. You must pay me.”
His airline carried the same case three days before, without charge; “I didn’t pay then and I am not going to pay now,” I assert. “Then your case will be left behind,” he says as he wanders off.
All the other cases are loaded; mine stands lonely on the concrete. The man’s assistant approaches. “If you give me 200 naira I will load your case,” he says.
An apocryphal anecdote springs to mind, one that the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Abid Hussain, is fond of telling. A United States senator is offered $200000 by an oil company to influence a law in their favour.
He refuses; they increase their offer. He declines again and they increase the inducement to $500000. The senator calls his secretary and asks her to throw the oilmen out. She asks why. “Because they’re coming dangerously close to my price,” he explains.
I tell the second luggage man in Abuja that he is getting alarmingly close to my price. After all, it’s barely R30. I can afford it; he needs it more than I do, no doubt. And we should not be prim about these matters; who knows how we will react when real temptation is placed before us.
But there is a point of principle as well. Fighting corruption involves taking an individual as well as an institutional stand. The one cannot succeed without the other.
In Abuja, I decide to make my modest stand. They blink first and my case is taken to the plane. As I walk up its steps, both men wave and smile. The ritual is complete – apparently with no hard feelings.
The phenomenon of contemporary corruption has an extensive wardrobe; its chameleon personality enables it to cut across class, race and borders.
From ELF’s purchase of a multimillion-franc apartment for the mistress of then French foreign minister Roland Dumas, to encourage him to withdraw his veto on the sale of arms to Taiwan, to the chronic deceitfulness of long-term German chancellor Helmut Kohl in respect of corporate sponsorship of his party, corruption never loses its capacity to surprise.
Exposing corruption takes courage. Sadly, the fight against corruption also demands victims to illuminate the relationship between cause and effect; and, although his case should be seen as an effect and not a cause, Tony Yengeni’s is an example of the importance of the scapegoat in this process, albeit one who played his cards so poorly that he was an accomplice to his own political fate.
Whether he is found guilty as charged or not, the fact that he must now face a serious criminal charge should serve to concentrate like minds in the future.
But, his case should neither mesmerise nor distract from the far more important issues that ought to constitute the heart of the ongoing joint investigation: the conflicts of interest at the heart of the decision-making process; the allegations that senior African National Congress figures or the party itself procured massive financial benefit from the five sets of contracts; the credibility of the off-sets, especially the “fast-tracking” of the Coega project despite the outstanding doubts about its economic viability; and the integrity of the investigation itself.
Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka is an astute operator who, with colleagues such as the wily Willie Hofmeyr and one of the best spin doctors in the business, Sipho Ngwema, has the capability to construct the sort of strategic management of the matter that was so obviously conspicuous by its absence during the early stages of the controversy.
The first time I ever met Ngcuka, at a court hearing during the 1994 election, I asked him in my ignorance whether he was with the ANC. With that engagingly charming mixture of the mischievous and the arrogant, he replied: “I am the ANC.”
That self-confidence and his immense talents mean that he is probably one of the few people that can balance their loyalty to the ANC with the need to protect their own integrity and the integrity of the institutions of democratic accountability that they serve.
Getting the balance right must represent one of the greatest challenges of his life so far. It remains to be seen whether he finds it.
In the meantime, we should see the Yengeni case as one that accords with the definition of corruption that Guy Dehn, doyen of United Kingdom whistle-blowing, employs, namely, “a deal you are not part of”.
This definition is valuable because it captures the essence of the most corrosive aspect of corrupt practice: that it fuels social and economic exclusion and inequality by permitting those who can afford it to buy influence and access to decision-making power.
Thus, through the Yengeni prism we can develop a clearer understanding of how corruption works in practice.
A company sets out to get from A to Z – the point at which they close the deal or win the tender. They look for people who can help them navigate the journey. They offer gifts and other inducements which, in themselves, are relatively minor; moreover, it may well be true that none of the recipients can on their own determine the outcome of the tender. But together they offer a patchwork quilt of that most valuable commodity: secret information.
An individual is given a car, or whatever. Three months later he or she gets a call: how’s the car going and, by the way, do you happen to know who sits on the departmental procurement committee? Another recipient gets a different question: do you know where X – who sits on the procurement committee – hangs out; does he like golf or jazz? A third: “When are they meeting?” And a fourth, most crucially: “What is the likely winning price?” The quarry is circled and nailed.
This is what we must learn from the Yengeni case, whether he is found guilty or not. Attention must focus on the recipient and the giver: both have their price.
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