This week the Mail & Guardian throws a harsh spotlight on the growing practice of politicians’ spouses and other immediate family members landing fat government contracts to found and build their private businesses.
The African National Congress sees nothing problematic in the practice, arguing that spouses are private citizens with constitutionally guaranteed rights to pursue an occupation, and that nothing more is required than compliance with tender procedures, and declaration and self-recusal when there is a conflict of interests. An underlying sentiment is that politically connected spouses should not be excluded from the general policy of “affirmative procurement”, in terms of which aspiring black entrepreneurs get a leg-up from state tenders.
Unfortunately, matters are more complicated than that. As Public Service Accountability Monitor director Colm Allen points out, tender boards are not entirely immune from political pressures, as their members are themselves appointed by the government.
In the case of the Eastern Cape, Allen points to the obvious anomaly of a tender board being asked to adjudicate a contract bid by the premier’s wife, when the premier has a role in deciding the board’s composition. In addition, Cabinet members are intimate associates and, for the most part, senior members of the same party. In this context, it makes little sense to distinguish between contracts awarded by a department under a spouse’s direct control and one under the control of a spouse’s colleague.
The larger issue is the growth of “crony capitalism” in South Africa. This implies the use of political and government connections to secure private business opportunities. The obvious dangers are that transparency in state procurement is lost, that the taxpayer is cheated because government work goes to political cronies rather than to deserving suppliers, that government policy and spending priorities come to reflect private business interests rather than the public good, and that a political-business caste emerges with enormous and partly unaccountable power.
South Africa’s regulation of this area clearly needs to be tightened. There is much merit in the suggestion of Hennie van Vuuren, of the Institute of Strategic Studies, that the immediate relatives of executive members of government should simply be barred from doing business with the state.
Inching towards peace in Africa
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and the launch of the African Peace and Security Council (APSC) this week is only the beginning of the bird’s long migration. But the move in Addis Ababa is indubitably a most hopeful one for our suffering continent.
The APSC cuts down the thickets of sovereignty that previously provided easy cover for despots and kleptocrats. It was the inability to act that rendered the old Organisation for African Unity toothless. Worse, it allowed tyrants like Mobutu Sese Seko, Idi Amin and Mohammed Siad Barre to plunder their countries, and was the reason Africa stood helpless as more than a million people died in Rwanda only a decade ago.
Now Africans are empowered to intervene in cases of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. If early warnings by the APSC are effective, direct intervention across borders might be obviated.
Considerable work lies ahead before the much-vaunted APSC’s teeth are able to bite. Critical eyes will scrutinise the selection of a “council of the wise”, which will gather five eminent Africans — one from each of the continent’s regions — to give sage advice based on collective institutional experience. Here is an opportunity to acknowledge Africa’s best, not necessarily its most popular or politically expedient.
It would be a grave setback if a leader like Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe was favoured for a retirement job.
The proposed standby force could, for financial reasons, take as much as a decade to come into operation. This will see a sizeable contingent from every region trained and equipped to spring into action in cases of conflict, natural disaster and humanitarian crisis.
The success of this force is contingent on the special fund to be established with contributions from each African Union member state. It will need many years of the kind of healthy growth — 3,7% — announced by the African Development Bank at its AGM in Kampala this week before all 53 AU members can chip in adequately.
So, for the foreseeable future, the APSC’s function will remain largely symbolic. It will provide early warning of conflict and disaster, make token interventions and, hopefully, name and shame the evil-doers.