Rainbow Nation Ruined

Way back in November 2004, whilst serving as South Africa's deputy President, Jacob Zuma begged for cash saying he was one of the country's "poorest politicians".... 

ANC Begging Bowls Are Out

... he did so whilst addressing a fundraiser for the 'Jacob Zuma RDP Education Trust' in Durban, South Africa, where he joked about his alleged financial poverty status, while asking the business community to open their cheque books.

"You know democracy ... it's very expensive, time-consuming, very costly. And if the ANC has to maintain that route [of] democracy, it must be strong," he said. .... well he sure corrected that when he got to the presidential office. South Africa's 'Zondo' Commission on corruption has now confirmed the looting of billions of dollars from South Africa's state coffers under former African National Congress (ANC) President Jacob Zuma, whose son Duduzane was named as the conduit of much of the criminal activities.

The ANC, which has governed the country since the end of white-minority rule in 1994, was also corrupted by wealthy businessmen such as the Gupta brothers, who allegedly tried to influence political and economic decisions in a process known as "state capture".

The commission also confirmed that many ANC leaders, including former and current government ministers, allegedly participated or encouraged the looting of state institutions at a massive cost to the country.

The thefts were on an industrial scale, and barely hidden, the country's revenue service was raided, the national air carrier South African Airways, was starved of funds, and there was looting of the agency that runs the country's passenger railways .... whilst political interference of the public broadcaster, the SABC, and the intelligence agencies stopped investigations of the corruption at the highest level.

An example of how corruption damages South Africa is the fact that during the winter months, Eskom, the state power company which supplies more than 90% of the nation's electricity, has to schedule power cuts ('load-shedding') of to up to six hours a day, to avoid catastrophic grid collapse, and has been doing so for the past 14 years. This has been affecting the country’s growth rates by being a dead anchor on the economy.

Eskom's problems emanate from a R392bn ($26bn £21bn) debt burden, gross mismanagement and government interference, along with an ageing and failing electricity grid. There is a sizeable corruption element in the fact that it greatly inflated its payroll by taking on unneeded staff (patronage jobs that have inflated operating costs), whilst not increasing generating capacity, with virtually no change in the group’s power generation over the period, and not adequately maintaining plants and invest in new ones despite more demand. It did recently build two new power stations at Medupi and Kusile, but both have design flaws and are unable to provide power on a constant basis, achieving only 40% reliability.

Frankly, I am only mildly surprised that anyone is surprised that South Africa is not any different from the other basket cases of the continent. Transparency International confirmed that all sub Saharan Africans feel that corruption blights their lives, with the necessity to pay bribes for basic services affecting around 75 million adults each year.

As one African writer put it "African leaders are often clumsy and messy in their corruption. Like bandits who rob in plain sight and spend their heist in full view of their victims – not that if they were more sophisticated it would make it acceptable, but it would at least minimise the licentious leakage of public confidence which is a key pillar of democratic stability."

So Sub-Saharan Africa has once again been ranked as the lowest scoring region on Transparency Internationals Corruption Perception Index for 2021.