The four reports of the Zondo Commission are now finally in the public domain. Officially known as The Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector, Including Organs of State, the reports are a sad and tragic indictment of the extent to which the ruling ANC party has failed its already beleaguered citizens and a growing population of alienated youth, whose bulging demographic are increasingly resorting to forms of nihilist behaviour. At an estimated cost of R1 billion—more than any other judicial inquiry ever held in the country—the four reports cover key thematic areas which lay bare the anatomy of what de facto is a grand criminal conspiracy instigated by a mafia-like cartel of thieves. It is indeed ironic that President Jacob Zuma, who established the Commission in January 2018, has come to occupy the villainous apex as the cause célèbre in the state capture saga. With levels of illicit intrigue and manipulative trickery that belong more in Hollywood, this state capture drama was engineered by the Gupta family to rob this country’s citizens of billions of their patrimony, while being aided and abetted by former President Zuma and his servile coterie of compromised minions. 

Metaphor and implications of the reports 

In the four reports completed over a lifespan of more than four years, there are revealing diagnostic insights and detailed forensic assessments provided, thanks to 278 witnesses and close to 160 000 pages of testimony and evidence. Quite crucially, the reports identify about 130 protagonists who are directly implicated in the Gupta’s scheming and looting and who must without equivocation face criminal sanction and prosecution. However, what comes out of the Commission’s work is also an inestimable public good, with tales of heroism on the part of those who sacrificed reputations and careers because they believed in an overriding imperative to protect the public interest based on a manifest sense of duty and obligation. 

The Commission was competently led by its chairperson and now Chief Justice, Raymond Zondo, a man of great integrity, patience, and commitment who was ably assisted by a highly skilled investigative and secretarial team, headed by Paul Pretorius SC and Itumeleng Mosala, respectively. In the four damning reports, Part 1 deals with SA Airways and its Associated Companies; Part 2 with Transnet; Part 3 with BOSASA; and Part 4 with the capture of Eskom. However, what resonates through all the reports is the extent of ANC complicity and the duplicitous behaviour of those who served as its deployed cadres across the spatial and institutional architecture that constitute the state capture landscape of the reports. 

Thus, Chairperson Zondo asserts in the fourth report: “The ANC and the ANC government should be ashamed that this happened under their watch.” And then he asks plaintively: “Where was the ANC as the Guptas took control of important SOEs [State-Owned Enterprises] such as Transnet, Eskom, and Denel? Where were they? What were they doing?” Of course, we know the answer because the ANC was, directly and indirectly, involved as the ruling party in lubricating the machinery of state capture, besides being an active rent-seeker in that sordid process. 

All said the reports have serious implications for the country as a developmental state where SOEs were supposed to be drivers of growth and development. They have rather descended into a morass of mismanagement, poor governance, and abused mandates, becoming sites of fast and gratuitous forms of wealth accumulation as any of the reports will attest to and make abundantly clear. The consequences for the majority of the poor are far-reaching. Since 1994, the country’s people and citizens have been thrown together as overlapping communities of fate, with a moral infrastructure based on the quest for building a better society for all; and a ruling party that enjoyed the political capital and normative currency to lead that process.  However, now across this land, there is a growing sense of hopelessness, despair, disillusionment, and anger. South Africa is fast resembling a Hobbesian world where life has become nasty, brutish, and short. In the country’s increasingly perforated racial profile, there is above all an abiding fear about what the future holds across a political landscape that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex, compounded by a stressed body politic and a stagnating and ailing economy, recently battered by the impact of the Covid pandemic, social unrest, and devastating floods. 

Consider that for the first time since 2009, South Africa has been stuck in a low growth trap of under 1%; and while public debt was 30% of GDP in 2008, it will rise to 74% by 2023 according to Treasury estimates. This signifies an astonishing collapse of the country’s macro-economic fundamentals, now seriously exacerbated by the scourge of state capture. Fiscal sustainability has been further compromised by state capture and with it, the government’s inability to rein in spending which will increase from R1.8 trillion in 2019 to R2.2 trillion this year. 

In the final analysis and as the Zondo reports lay bare, it begs the question of how such egregious forms of looting, corruption, and thuggery could occur, which further undermine an already fragile social contract under the ruling ANC government that has mismanaged the country’s economy? And this for the standard-bearer of liberation whose moral character was grounded in addressing the deep-rooted legacies and racially inspired deprivations of the apartheid era? Metaphor opens a useful prism to understanding the strategic intersection of language, ideas, and politics. These are critical components which inform not only the discursive canon of the way we speak, hear, read, and write about our political life but crucially, how we construct meaning. 

The metaphor of liberation was supposed to inaugurate a better life for all but now after 28 years, it has come to mean one that relegates the country to a Hobbesian world of gloom, doom, and suffering. The Zondo reports provide further evidence of this metaphorical regress and decline whose hallmark is one of fatalism and a visceral pessimism. It will be a Sisyphean struggle for the country to recover from the excesses of state capture and its intensely disturbing pathos under a government that has fatally betrayed the metaphor of liberation and its attendant hopes and ideals as enshrined in batho pele or putting people first. 

The damaged fabric of liberation 

The Zondo reports are, therefore, symptomatic of an underlying cynicism in our national life where the powerful and networks of ANC patronage get what they desire while the weak majority suffer what they must. Consequently, the ANC has hopelessly failed the test of what the great French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, called ‘governmentality’ which has to do with the responsibility of government to provide consequential welfare and security for its citizens that is normatively defined and ethically driven. Instead, the Zondo reports are emblematic of a growing pathological syndrome where the ANC government has countenanced and presided over greater inequity and injustice, whose manifestations are rising levels of racially determined poverty, inequality, and unemployment, compounded by economic stagnation, institutional decay, and social dislocation. 

Rather than providing the utilitarian equivalent of governmentality as the greatest good for the greatest number and thereby, embedding the metaphor of liberation in society, there has been a descent into a patrimonial and predatory type of politics as chronicled in the Zondo reports. This is alien and antithetical to the core values enshrined in the constitution which in its preamble enjoins elected representatives to heal the divisions of the past, build the foundations of a free and democratic society, and critically, to improve the quality of life of all citizens. The Zondo reports show that the country has now reached an intersection which is reminiscent of what the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, wrote in his Prison Notebooks when reflecting on the crisis of Italian fascism: “If the ruling class has lost its consensus, that it is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.” And then in one of Gramsci’s most cogent and profound insights, he writes: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” 

The current juncture in South African politics and history could thus be seen as an expression of this disturbing Gramscian moment. Rather than dealing with the morbid symptoms that accompany South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, the ANC—in terms of Zondo’s plaintive question—has rather contributed to their multiplication and reproduction in the form of factionalism, corruption, abuse of the public weal, wastage of resources, lack of accountability, poor governance and so on. And herein lies a major conundrum for the ANC: given the current balance of political forces, it is doubtful whether it can renew itself as a political party on the one hand; and promote an organic ideological order of change in its alliance with the SACP and COSATU, on the other. If the recent Workers Day heckling of President Ramaphosa by protesting mineworkers at the Royal Bafokeng Stadium is anything to go by, on both fronts, there has been political decay and atrophy of ideas in generating the necessary balance of moral forces for progressive change within the state and in society at large. 

Crisis and decline in the ANC 

Hence the SACP and COSATU have hardly been complementary ideological axes or supportive political pillars in guiding the ANC in how it could broaden and deepen its hegemony and legitimacy, especially during the destructive state capture period of the Zuma presidency and its depressing aftermath. What the Zondo reports jointly show is that South Africa faces a  conjunctural crisis where a simultaneous decline of the economy, politics, and society converges to make up a toxic brew, codified by a cancerous regime of patrimonial and patron-client politics. This conjuncture represents a watershed Gramscian development that has inaugurated a struggle for the “soul of the ANC” among its fractious forces. With the inchoate Radical Economic Transformation (RET) disciples of populism leading the march, there is widespread conceptual and moral confusion in trying to make sense of how the ANC and its alliance partners could reinvent themselves in the disenchanted electoral marketplace. 

An unresolved strategic dilemma—on which the ANC’s “Ready to Govern” documents of 1992 tried to impose some analytical and operational order—is that the regeneration of the ANC has often been lost in managing the schizoid tension of being both a liberation movement and a political party. The Zondo reports are not only a statement of the ANC’s existential crisis and decline but also demonstrate the serious consequences of its failures in governmentality. Indeed, the erosion of the ANC’s popular base has now found its way into registrations of growing discontent through the ballot box as witnessed in its declining fortunes during the municipal elections of 2016 and 2021. 

Once more, here Gramsci is very instructive when he writes: 

“At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous because the field is wide open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic men of destiny.” 

Ultimately and to conclude, the Zondo reports cast a long shadow on the crisis and decline in the ANC and moreover, on the troubling developments which state capture has given rise. These troubling developments have reached endemic proportions, reverberating as they do in the economy, politics, institutions, society, the public sector, and the country’s global image and brand. The four reports thus speak volumes (no pun intended) of the delicate and dangerous terrain that the country has entered because of the vertical and horizontal detachment of the ANC and its alliance partners from ordinary people. In this corrosive patrimonial milieu of patron and clients which the reports methodically dissect, the stage is set for ongoing politically deviant behaviour that is devoid of any ethical content and moral responsibility. 

Sadly, the Zondo reports are a metaphorical reprise of fatalism since it is very difficult to imagine how the liberating and emancipating ethos of batho pele could ever be realised under the current conjuncture of state failure and with the ANC at the political helm of South Africa.