Okay, time to draw breath. Where are we at, and what is next? First of all: whatever ulterior political motives may exist, President Thabo Mbeki has made a potent statement against corruption. A new standard has been set, not just for public life and public ethics, but for the government and the African National Congress. This is a tipping point in the history of the ruling party.
Hitherto the ANC has by and large preferred to deal with miscreants quietly, behind closed doors. Political exile or a rapid flattening of the individual’s career was the preferred sanction.
But there could be no fudging this one. As Mbeki himself said in his dramatic speech to Parliament: ‘We have had no precedent to guide us as we considered our response to the judgement of Justice Squires.”
His use of the word ‘we” was really less about the ‘royal we”, and more a sense that for the ANC as a party of government this was a coming of age.
There cannot be a single small fish that is not quaking with fear now that such a big fish has been landed.
Later this year, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk will be cross-examined in the Peter Marais/David Malatsi trial. If he knew at the time about a corrupt R400 000 donation made to the New National Party when he was its leader, he must be sweating profusely now.
We wanted the right tone set from the top, and now we have it, which is a cause for solemn celebration.
However, the immaturity of South African political culture has permitted an unfortunate and unhelpful idea to emerge as the central plank of Jacob Zuma’s strategy to retrieve his irretrievable presidential ambitions. Namely, the idea that you are not culpable politically unless you are proven guilty legally.
This is nonsense. It is an abuse of the doctrine of the rule of law and a disregard of democratic politics. When you have screwed up, you must pay a political penalty. A criminal court requires that a defendant be proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. It is, rightly, a high standard. In politics the bar is set lower.
If this misguided logic about the relationship between legal and political culpability is pursued to its nth degree, it could mean that if Zuma is acquitted he will be able to claim that he is fit to assume the presidency.
Clearly it is up to Mbeki to instil, in the public discourse and the ANC itself, a different understanding of the relationship between legal and political justice.
The history of democratic politics and governments worldwide is littered with ministers who have made misjudgments or permitted their positions of power to be infiltrated by those with malign intent. Once there is a critical mass of evidence — the political test, as opposed to the legal test — of wrongdoing that minister must go. Serve his or her time, and after a while they can return to politics.
There is no need for Zuma to be sent to Siberia forever. He can come back into public office, perhaps even into the Cabinet, but only in a few years.
If Mbeki fails to win this debate, he is in for a protracted and dirty fight that will be as much about class and power as it is about justice and corruption. The second strand in Zuma’s defence strategy is to portray himself as a working-class hero, unfairly sacked by the all-powerful capital-owning toffs at the top. Given the trajectory of intra-alliance politics, this is as understandable as it is absurd.
But let me reiterate the point I made a fortnight ago, this time more bluntly. The fact that the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party now find themselves having to defend a man whose judgement and integrity is so profoundly in question is a powerful indication of the weakness of the left; of its failure of strategy; and of the way it is persistently outwitted by Mbeki.
The leaders of the left should drop Zuma, find an alternative, and do so very, very quickly. Some of them have not so much pinned their colours to the Zuma mast as stapled their bodies to it. As HMS JZ sinks, with its bounty of struggle-era secrets aboard, will they detach themselves or risk a watery grave? And will they encourage Zuma to open the treasure chest and by so doing invite yet more division and bloodletting?
Surely that would be to layer misjudgement upon misjudgement.
As a senior ANC leftist put it in the lobby of the National Assembly after Mbeki’s announcement: ‘We have to recognise that corruption is the biggest threat to progressive politics in this country. We backed the wrong horse. Zuma’s affability was never enough to justify the faith we put in him.”
In this context, the disingenuousness of Zuma’s decision to resign as an MP should not go unchallenged. He has said that it would not have been ‘right” for him to have kept his seat in Parliament. What, even when he says he has done nothing wrong? Tosh.
It was to avoid an ethics committee investigation into a breach of the disclosure rules. Once you leave the parliamentary ‘club”, the ethics committee is — conveniently for Zuma and the ANC on this occasion — without any authority. That cannot be right; reform is necessary.
Lastly, the arms deal. It just won’t go away. Nor should it. I hear the British Serious Fraud Office is extending its investigation into the conduct of BAe systems to include the South African sale. Mbeki was careful in his statement to Parliament to re-draw the line about the deal; careful to state that Squires’s judgement made no difference to the innocence of his government. As things stand that may be so — politically as well as legally. But the festering sores continue to fester, whatever Zuma’s own future holds.