The tribute to Brett Kebble by Khanyo Gqulu last week (‘Our north, our south, our east and west”) would have been the most delicious piece of satire had it not been offered in such apparently deadly earnest. It — along with the rest of the sickly tributes to Kebble over the past 10 days — illustrates at least two things about the new South Africa.
Firstly, that there is more than one elite-building project going on. Secondly, that the interplay between money and politics has reached epidemic proportions. There are different and self-evidently competing sites of capital accumulation and acquisition. Kebble won the affection of a group of wannabe millionaires because he was willing to help extend the game beyond the usual suspects — the Patrice Motsepe and Mzi Khumalos of this brave new world.
What is fascinating is how quickly a new elite — forged in the afterglow of Nelson Mandela’s national reconciliation project and further encouraged by President Thabo Mbeki’s readiness to support the emergence of a small but powerful group of black captains of industry — rapidly becomes a political and economic establishment (an ‘elite compact” to use the old-fashioned Marxist jargon).
The Kebble-sponsored band of comrades challenges this establishment, with profound political repercussions. That may not necessarily be a bad thing, but to paint Kebble as some sort of benevolent patrician is as unconvincing as the desire of some people to portray Jacob Zuma as a great socialist hero.
To pretend that Kebble was unaware of these consequences and was not investing heavily in the political outcomes would be an exercise in naivety. That the outcomes — such as in the Western Cape, where Kebble chose to inject cash mainly into one side of a deeply divided African National Congress — could also serve to undermine government performance must not be neglected.
The glue that binds these two trends is the notion of ‘clientelism” — a relatively new term that features in contemporary democratic governance and anti-corruption thinking — in which office holders in public institutions provide services to groups of ‘clients” bound to them by ethnic, geographic, economic or other ties.
The line between what is ‘public” and what is ‘private” is blurred or obscured and thus the abuse of public office for personal gain is a routine occurrence.
Regrettably, South African politics is going through a rocky period in which ‘clientelism” is fast becoming a defining characteristic. Instability caused by uncertainty over the succession and the related matter of Zuma was probably unavoidable; the extent to which economic and political interests intertwine perhaps less so.
How can politics protect itself from such compelling impulses? Public funding is part of the answer. While much of the attention has rightly been directed at the problem of secret private donations, it is also worth considering how the public funding regime can be strengthened.
There are two obvious issues. One is the amount of public money. This year R74-million will be distributed to those political parties represented in the National Assembly and nine provincial legislatures. All political parties are desperately short of money. Hence the call from the ANC for an increase in public funding — not something that in the current climate is likely to attract universal public support.
The other issue relates to the formula for allocation. When the 1997 public funding law was passed a parliamentary committee decided that the two principles that the Constitution says are material, namely proportionality and equity, should be balanced 90:10 in favour of the former. What this now means is that the ANC gets 74% of 90% of the R74-million. It is not easy to see how this serves the constitutional objective of supporting multiparty democracy. The 90:10 split is ripe for reform or constitutional challenge.
The other problem is the way in which the equitable 10% is divided among the provinces according to the proportion of seats a province has in relation to the total number of provincial seats. In practice the formula favours larger parties in the application of the equitable and proportional components of the allocation. Parties with representation across more than one province receive a larger sum of the equitable component of the fund than parties with a substantially regional-based representation.
Floor crossing has further distorting effects on allocations under the formula. The recent defection period resulted in a number of single-member parties in the national and provincial legislatures. The application of the equity component of the formula at provincial level only means that single-member parties in provincial legislatures receive larger shares of the total fund than single-member parties in the National Assembly that, if they have no provincial representation, receive nothing from the equity transfer.
The provincial bias of the equity component also means that a new party such as the United Independent Front with two MPs in the National Assembly, but six MPLs across four provincial legislatures, will now receive a larger share of the total fund than the United Democratic Movement, which has six national MPs but whose five MPLs have seats in only two provincial legislatures.
Clearly, there are anomalies in the system that deserve attention. Overall, the system of public funding benefits the biggest parties. While it may have barely more than 10% of the seats in Parliament, the Democratic Alliance likes to think of itself as a ‘big party” and to guide its political judgements accordingly. Its latest act of strategic delusion is to think that a ‘two-party” system is both achievable and desirable. Hence, the DA leadership has embarked on a campaign to harm all the other opposition parties. Their arrogant disregard of proper process and disinclination to support initiatives that benefit the opposition, let alone contemplate cooperation or coalitions with minority parties, reveals that the DA’s rhetoric around principles such as transparency and multiparty democracy is as disingenuous as it is empty. In short, the DA bears all the hallmarks of a Conservative Party whose horizons extend only so far as its own narrow interests.
So, to the right and to the left, the picture is rather discouraging. At the bulging centre, there is a feeding frenzy. The postmodern tapestry of Kebble’s funeral was unappealing, but from a coldly analytical perspective an entirely apt depiction of a congealing overlap between money and politics — old and nouveau. Is this really to be the enduring image of South Africa?