Since we started publishing in 1985, the Mail & Guardian has uncovered corruption in both the private and public sectors. Inkathagate, the investigation that told how the state was secretly funding Inkatha as a bulwark against the African National Congress, helped alter the course of the country’s politics.
When 1994 came, the M&G kept up its work, quickly establishing its reputation as a corruption-busting newspaper. From early on in the post-democratic epoch, the newspaper has had a special interest in the oil industry. In the mid-Nineties, Mungo Soggot told the story of how the Liberian criminal businessman Emmanuel Shaw II had been hired to restructure South Africa’s oil industry.
In 2003, Stefaans Brümmer and Sam Sole revealed the joint venture between Case Lawal and various high-profile African National Congress leaders and their wives in creating the SA Oil Company, which won various lucrative oil concessions from Nigeria. The problem was that the SA Oil Company was domiciled in the Cayman Islands, and not a cent of value accrued to the South African public, though the concession was won in its name.
Then, the Oilgate scandal this year revealed how an ANC-linked oil company, Imvume Management, gave R11million to the party ahead of last year’s national elections, when it was particularly cash-strapped. In giving to the ANC, Imvume did not pay its bill to Glencore, ensuring that the state-run Petro SA had, in effect, to make a double payment.
Shocking stuff. But for its trouble, the M&G is being sued to hell and back by the ANC and Imvume, with every indication that state resources are being used to assist their cases. It is a notable infringement of our press freedom and it is doubly ironic that it comes in the same year that President Thabo Mbeki has upped the ante on corruption.
He is clearly a president who has changed his mind on this cancer, yet our experiences show that he sits astride a state and a ruling party, that still wants to shoot the messenger.
In 2003, Mbeki clearly saw the coverage of corruption as a racist plot to besmirch a black government. In his infamous letter, entitled Fishers of Corrupt Men, Mbeki castigates investigations into the arms deal. Yet, two years later, he fired his deputy president after he was found to have a ”generally corrupt” relationship with Schabir Shaik, the businessman found guilty of graft perpetrated in the course of that same arms deal.
By last week, and in three other speeches this year, Mbeki has acknowledged that the ruling party and the state are trapped in a ”self-seeking spirit” of ”plunder”.
I make no special pleading for the M&G, but our experiences in trying to investigate Oilgate suggest that the gap between presidential and political word and deed is still yawningly wide.
Changing tune
”…we should not, and will not abandon the offensive to defeat the insulting campaigns further to entrench the stereotype that has, for centuries, sought to portray Africans as … corrupt, given to telling lies, prone to theft and self-enrichment by immoral means…” — ANC President Thabo Mbeki’s Letter from the President, ANC Today, May 30 to June 5 2003
”These goings-on [positioning for local elections] tell the naked truth that the ranks are being corrupted by a self-seeking spirit that leads some among us to view membership of our organisation as a stepping stone to access to state power, which they would then use corruptly to plunder the people’s resources for their personal benefit.” — Mbeki’s Letter from the President, ANC Today, October 14 to 21 2005