A few years ago, the opposition in South Africa released another of what had been a string of attacks on the failings of the state. The Auditor General had just made his report public, and its contents — a fairly damning catalogue of misspent or misappropriated funds — provided a convoy-load of ammunition to the shrill finger-pointers.
Presenting a catalogue of excesses, the report lingered on the ministry of education (‘still experiencing widespread mismanagement”) before revealing that the South African military had managed to blow almost half a billion while providing the Auditor General with accounting records which, in his words, contained ‘material deficiencies and fell short of required standards”.
That press statement, brimming over with righteous indignation, was written and published in March 1994, and issued by the ANC. To youthful ears, the sanctimonious timbre of the lecture seems to have a white, suburban quality; but there was a time when revolutionaries also whined, trumpeting all the middle-class morality, with its impractical and sheltered optimism, for which white liberals are pilloried today.
The upliftment of the people would be funded, read the statement, ‘by putting an end to the waste, corruption, incompetence and bureaucracy, which drained the coffers of the NP government”. The words would be touching, perhaps even naively heroic, had they not been proved so depressingly hypocritical by the past decade.
Of course, it’s not only the tone that sounds white: it is also the appeal to arithmetic. The suburban classes, perhaps prompted by their suburban media, tend to favour condemnation through enumeration; the tallying up of the state’s gigantic wastefulness, to provide outraged audiences with 12-digit figures — figures that, when divided by the cost of houses for ‘the poor” or antiretrovirals for ‘the sick”, provide incontrovertible evidence that the ANC is a gang of nihilistic garden boys who break everything they touch.
It is a superficially satisfying exercise, but it is ultimately pointless. Using one’s calculator to point out that the arms-deal money could have housed 600 000 people is rather like pointing out that the world would be much better off if pollution didn’t cause climate change. It states the obvious, while ignoring certain eternal trends. Greenhouse gases heat the atmosphere. Psychopaths join corporations where their monstrous deficiencies gain them the admiration of their peers. And greedy, arrogant, duplicitous, snake-oil salesmen go into mainstream politics.
This is not a revelation. History insists that for every principled leader there are 10 scavengers in his or her shadow, and in South Africa it has been no different. The white bourgeoisie ignored the white pigs rooting in apartheid’s slops; and today’s ‘black diamonds” do the same with the equally venal black pigs at the trough of uncontrolled capitalism.
Which is why one shouldn’t have expected more from either the state or First National Bank (FNB) after last weekend’s exercise in bootlicking, abject self-censorship. After all, the only thing less trustworthy than a state is a corporation; and the gutless retreat by the bank was almost as vile as the reported criticisms from some of its competitors, who accused FNB of being opportunistic. Or perhaps it takes a profiteer to spot a profiteer. Who cares? They’re all welcome to each other.
FirstRand CEO Paul Harris told the Sunday Times that he ultimately decided to go ‘with what the collective view was”. Subsequent reports have suggested that the anti-crime campaign was canned because it threatened to destroy some hard-won trust that had been nurtured between white big business and the government. But these reports failed to address just why anyone would be flirting, feinting or pussyfooting in a debate purportedly about crime. If the ministry of safety and security is that easily offended, and business that terrified of causing offence, then what we have are not two groups of negotiating adults but rather a needy, twitchy toddler holding out a lollypop to a feral cat.
No, Mr Harris, let us be clear about our terms. If the withdrawal was to keep government happy, then it amounted to pandering. The ‘collective view” might have been shared by Business South Africa and others present, but ultimately that view was the state’s. After all, the state must, by definition, claim the collective view. When there is nothing left of this government but a President for Life, his mistress, his speech writer and their four imaginary friends, all sharing the last of the tinned condensed milk in a bunker, the collective view will still be claimed.
The motives of FNB were almost certainly layered, no doubt ranging from anaemically admirable to utterly excremental, but the state’s response was unequivocally disturbing. When a plea to elected officials to act in the best interests of the populace is branded ‘incitement” by the Presidency, one has to start wondering whether one’s deeply ambivalent rulers have stepped across the line and are now inimical towards the populace, regarding the masses as an obstacle in their path towards the consolidation of personal power.
After all, Jimmy Kruger has already been paraphrased without irony by Minister of Safety and Security Charles Nqakula. An ideology of denial and intellectual and moral isolation, from Aids to Zimbabwe, is once again national policy. Is this, then, how the new Sharpeville is going to play out? The poor and the terrorised cut down (whether by police or bandits, it matters little) so that the privilege of this cold, heavy-handed elite may be preserved?
After last week, one has to ask. Being left cold is one thing, but being chilled to the bone is quite another.