Political mafias and ‘business’ became common, for example municipal contracts between former eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede and the Delangokubona Business Forum. Photo: File
It’s now a little more than a decade and a half since Abahlali baseMjondolo first started to describe municipal politics in Durban in terms of gangsterism. At the time they were seldom believed in the middle-class world, which was still insulated from the criminality that was beginning to metastasise through our politics.
It was only when it became clear that Jacob Zuma and the Gupta brothers were running a wholesale kleptocracy that the middle classes began to grasp aspects of the situation, but the media focus on personalities — often moralistic rather than analytical — prevented a full understanding of the scale and aspirations of the political project that had cohered around Zuma. What came to be called state capture was a bottom-up as well as a top-down project. For people whose participation in politics was driven by personal rather than social ambitions, the rules and laws intended to govern liberal democracy and governance were a barrier to personal enrichment.
Many of these people understood their political project as a continuation and radicalisation of the national liberation struggle. But private enrichment for the few at the direct expense of the public good is, by its nature, predatory and socially destructive. It is indefensible to call the processes that turn public money meant for housing and hospitals into private fortunes anything other than predatory.
In the Zuma years Thabo Mbeki’s aspirations to build a modernising state gave way to something quite different. This is well illustrated in the rapid change in how shack settlements were governed in Durban. In the Mbeki period, the state pursued a modernist programme to “eradicate” shack settlements — an endeavour that did not set out to rely on state violence and repression, but, as is almost inevitably the case around the world, could not proceed without violent coercion.
After Zuma took office, there was often no longer an aspiration to eradicate shack settlements, but rather a desire by local political bosses to control them and extract wealth from them through the renting and sale of land and shacks and access to tenders for developmental projects. There were cases where ANC councillors encouraged land occupations, not as a social initiative, but as a means to consolidate personal power and accumulate wealth.
Repression now often took a murderous form. It was no longer only driven by the state through the police but also by izinkabi, professional assassins contracted by local political operators. The targets were people who stood in the way of local rackets, rather than people resisting a centralised state programme.
When Zuma was forced from office, the project that had cohered around him was not defeated. It continued to metastasise through the party and government, along a shifting set of networks, some linked to outright criminal actors. Today it expresses itself through a number of political parties, and finds willing collaborators in others.
The gangsterisation of politics is part of a wider normalisation of extortion and other mafia type rackets which are now common in construction, trucking and other businesses. There can be reciprocal and, at times, open support between “business” and political mafias, and we should not forget the attempt by the former Durban mayor, Zandile Gumede, to integrate the Delangokubona Business Forum into municipal contracting processes, or how the gangsterised elements in the trucking industry began the open breakdown in the rule of law that preceded the 2021 riots.
The days when the torture of grassroots activists in local police stations after arrests ordered by ward councillors, and their assassination by the izinkabi, happened in a world wholly apart from middle-class life have passed. The middle classes are no longer insulated from the gangsterisation of politics. The systematic diversion of public money into networks of patronage and private enrichment, many well described as mafias, has led to the rapid decay of infrastructure and the collapse of basic services — a process first visible in small towns and now evident in many of our cities. The violence that has been endured by grassroots activists for years has now decisively entered the middle-class world. For some years now, whistleblowers, prosecutors, auditors and business people who resist extortion have been at real risk of assassination.
Dealing with this will not be easy. One problem is that many of the people joining the ANC do so for the purposes of personal advancement rather than commitment to the party’s stated principles. It is inevitable that progressive projects that achieve state power will attract opportunists and joining a solidly entrenched ruling party is a very different thing to joining a liberation movement. It is not inevitable, though, that a movement or political party will be overwhelmed by this. In Brazil, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) struggles with it and suffers from it but has not been overwhelmed.
The emergence of new parties as the ANC’s hegemony declines does not resolve the problem. The opportunity that proportional representation provides to exploit coalition politics for rapid enrichment exerts a powerful attraction for unprincipled people and the desire to participate in governance through coalitions can encourage collaboration with corrupt people and parties. The idea of the uMkhonto weSizwe party controlling a municipal or provincial budget is chilling and anyone who has followed municipal politics in Johannesburg or Ekurhuleni knows that parties like the Economic Freedom Fighters, the Patriotic Alliance and Al Jama-ah are all compromised.
International experience shows just how bad things can get. From the 1970s into the 1980s, Jamaica became notorious for “garrison politics” — urban districts controlled by political parties and enforced through armed gangs. The two main parties each developed loyal enclaves in Kingston, where access to housing, jobs, and services was mediated through party-linked “dons”. These garrisons were simultaneously political and criminal entities.
In Mexico during the same period, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) presided over a political system that blended formal democracy with one-party dominance. By the 1980s, as its patronage machine deepened and the drug economy expanded, elements of the PRI — especially at the state and municipal levels — became entangled with organised crime. Police, local bosses and party officials often operated as a single structure, using state resources for both electoral dominance and illicit enrichment. Although the PRI lost the presidency in 2000, its long period in power left an enduring pattern of blurred lines between politics, business and organised crime.
In India, a deep fusion of criminality and electoral politics developed in the state of Bihar from the 1980s onwards. Parties across the spectrum have been linked to candidates with serious criminal allegations, including charges of murder, kidnapping and extortion. Some of these leaders emerged from oppressed communities and initially presented themselves in progressive terms but are now elected crime bosses.
It is very difficult to undo the criminalisation of politics once it is deeply entrenched, but progress is possible. Progressive governments in Brazil under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and in Colombia under Gustavo Petro achieved significant drops in murder rates, but the deep structures linking politics and organised crime remained largely intact. In Ecuador under Rafael Correa, there was both an extraordinary drop in murder rates — from 15.4 per 100,000 in 2007 to 5.8 in 2017 — and a marked weakening of organised crime’s influence over political life. The Indian state of Kerala under the Left Democratic Front and Uruguay under the Frente Amplio saw significant success in curbing the criminalisation of politics through institutional reforms. Perhaps most famously, Italy’s movements against the mafia showed that entrenched criminal power can be challenged when political will and public mobilisation align.
We need to act as fast and decisively as we can. Technical interventions to improve the management of public finances are essential, as are measures to strengthen policing and prosecution. Recourse to tenders needs to be avoided where possible.
We also need a decisive cultural shift towards recognising that the theft of public resources is theft from the people. The looting of funds meant for public housing, hospitals and services is a direct assault on society, doing the most harm to the worst off. We cannot continue, as happened with Shauwn Mkhize, to glamourise private fortunes built on plundered public wealth.
But, above all, we must recover an emancipatory project — a politics rooted in a genuine commitment to the collective good and a credible vision of social progress.
Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.