‘My hand,” Yasser Arafat once said, “is the only hand that can sign a peace agreement with Israel.” The assertion may sound vainglorious, but it was undoubtedly true. Israelis may yet come to rue the death of the 75-year-old Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader they refused to deal with for so long, and spent so much time demonising. Only he had the towering authority to make the necessary concessions required for peace, and to carry the Palestinian people with him. As Israeli radical Uri Avnery said this week: “If Arafat passes away, Israel will lose a great enemy, who could have become a great partner and ally.”
One of the generation of 20th-century anti-colonial leaders that also included Pandit Nehru, Nelson Mandela and Ho Chi Minh, Arafat’s great historical achievement was to put the Palestinians on the world map and keep them there.
Dispossessed, scattered and virtually forgotten in the years after the 1948 war, the Palestinians were able to reassert their national identity through the Palestinian Liberation Movement, founded by Arafat, and later the PLO, of which he took control after the Arab military debacle in 1967. It was under his leadership that the PLO became the undisputed representative of the Palestinians and their national aspirations. It was he who, after the Yom Kippur War, undertook the enormous task of persuading his people to recognise the Israeli state and settle for a partition giving them just more than 20% of their historic homeland.
Throughout the “second intifida”, Israelis have portrayed Arafat as a double-dealing hypocrite who has privately fostered terrorism, had no interest in peace and sought Israel’s destruction. The mantra, faithfully repeated by hard-line Zionists in South Africa, is that Israel “has no negotiating partner”. In reality, he was marginal to a spontaneous uprising against the hell of occupation, a virtual prisoner in his Ramallah headquarters under constant threat of assassination. His unique standing among Palestinians was unaffected. He became, in Avnery’s words, “the supreme symbol of resistance”.
Arafat had weaknesses — he became increasingly autocratic in his latter years, and there were questions about personal probity. But he leaves a gaping void, which peace-seeking Israelis will find hard to fill. His terms — a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, cleared of Israeli settlements; Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem, and negotiations on the return of Palestinian exiles — remain an absolute minimum for the Palestinian people, and the only basis for a peaceful resolution of one of the world’s longest-running and most dangerous conflicts.
Time to think about ANC Inc
The journey of African National Congress leaders into the business world has been nothing short of gob-smacking. A quick count reveals that almost one-third of the party’s national executive committee is now in business. That figure balloons if the ANC Youth League’s corporate bent is taken into account. Earlier this year we revealed that the “young lions” sit atop a business empire spanning interests in everything from cellphones to mining and IT.
And if you take into account the number of ministers’ spouses who are benefiting from state contracts, as well as of ANC MPs, and provincial Cabinets and legislatures, it is safe to say that ANC Inc is what defines the ruling party in the 21st century.
Is this necessarily wrong? The ANC has always been a broad church. Originally a party of the middle and professional classes, it is in some senses returning to its roots.
But under democratic rule and in a free market economy, the intersection of business and politics is littered with potholes. Take this week’s deal, from which ANC bigwigs Andile Ngcaba and Smuts Ngonyama stand to benefit. The conflicting interests the deal — which could still be scuppered — entails are numerous. As the former director general of the Communications Department, Ngcaba played a key role in ensuring that Telkom keeps its cushy monopoly. He is also the chairperson of Didata, a supplier to Telkom.
Then there’s Ngonyama, an ANC national executive committee member and the ANC’s head of the presidency. He is privy to discussions on the direction of parastatals like Telkom, suggesting the consortium he advised has an inside track that other contenders may not.
The deal also conflicts with the stated aims of black empowerment laws. The aim of the Broad-Based Black Empowerment Act is to spread the benefits in a way that the Telkom deal does not. It falls into the category of low-impact wealth “transfer”, rather than the “transformative” transactions ANC secretary general Kgaleme Motlanthe referred to in his watershed September speech.
ANC Inc seems omnipresent and deeply entrenched — but the ANC left is growing increasingly impatient with elite deal-making. It is a trend that must be carefully scrutinised and held to account, which the Mail & Guardian pledges to do. It is time for post-employment restrictions to apply to senior politicians, civil servants and even party functionaries to prevent the conflicts the Telkom deal raises. And it is time to think about ANC Inc.