ANTHONY BUTLER: A handy round-up of Zondo’s damning findings

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

09 JUNE 2023

Paul Holden’s handy new book, Zondo at Your Fingertips, provides a much-needed wake-up call to SA’s disgruntled but exhausted citizens.

As Holden observes, the Zondo state capture inquiry was a mammoth and historic enterprise, comprising 75,000 pages of transcripts, 1.7-million pages of documentary evidence and 19 volumes of findings stretching to an astounding 4,750 pages. According to Holden, we now face the “potential tragedy” that the commission’s reports will remain largely unread and ignored. 

Holden is broadly impressed by an inquiry he describes as “the real deal”. Critics of a model that is deployed in most Commonwealth countries, this columnist included, may initially counter that Holden is perpetuating the misconception that commissions are actually meant to uncover the truth. 

In reality, claim the naysayers, formal commissions are often used by governments to evade responsibility for unpopular decisions, for example about the location of unwelcome airports or nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, an inquiry into a terrible event, such as a massacre of striking mineworkers by the police, can move so slowly that guilty parties can co-ordinate their excuses and public outrage can subside. 

Findings are typically couched in legal jargon and published in multiple volumes so vast that they are in effect inaccessible. The judges who chair such investigations can be quite good at setting out some of what actually happened in some detail. But they rarely pin down the culpability of particular individuals and they are poorly equipped to make policy recommendations about how to prevent a recurrence. 

But Holden is no innocent. He testified at the Seriti commission of inquiry into arms deal corruption and describes the farrago of nonsense that now retired judge Willie Seriti birthed — a report set aside by the high court in 2019 — as a “shameful whitewash”.  

He is also critical of many aspects of judge Raymond Zondo’s report: the highly uneven quality of its forensic analysis; its kid-glove handling of multinational corporations and enablers such as big auditing companies; its inability to place state capture in its international context; and its failure to interrogate the SA banks that turned a blind eye to unmissable money laundering.  

Despite these flaws, Holden insists Zondo has performed a great service for SA by “digging deep” into the facts, establishing widely accepted realities in the face of disinformation exercises, and flagging the political dimension of state capture, including ANC culpability. 

Holden’s real usefulness is that he casts a highly sceptical eye over Zondo’s recommendations while insisting SA society must engage with and improve upon them. 

His readable synthesis reduces Zondo’s wordy recommendation volume to a series of clearly specified problems: a fragile procurement system; the collapse of state-owned enterprise (SOE) governance; the negative effects of party political funding; the vulnerability of whistleblowers; and multiple failures of oversight mechanisms. 

Zondo’s proposed remedies are a mixed bag indeed. Some are plausible, such as a new institutional architecture for procurement, including professional procurement officers and proper whistleblower protection, and an oversight committee for SOE board appointments. Others, such as a “charter against corruption” and the criminalisation of donations given in expectation of contracts, are merely hot air.

A few of Zondo’s ideas, such as deferred prosecution agreements that allow companies to treat illegal activity as a business expense, or his poorly informed ruminations on SA’s electoral system, are at best half-baked. 

Holden’s purpose is not to glorify Zondo or insist on the implementation of his various recommendations. Rather he is intensely alert to the problem that the commission of inquiry model does not incorporate any implementation machinery.

It is up to political organisations and citizens to take stock of the enormous resource that Zondo has provided and to interrogate and then push forward the credible intervention opportunities. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.