Moral courage and decency irrelevant as SA’s finance minister resigns
- David Everatt
If politicians see only personal advantage from other's 'weakness’ – defined here as honesty, seeking forgiveness, repentance – then the future is bleak.
South Africa’s once-lauded, lately beleaguered Finance Minister, Nhlanhla Nene, has had his resignation accepted by President Cyril Ramaphosa. His successor, Tito Mboweni, becomes the country’s sixth finance minister in four years.
The President is desperately trying to dig South Africa out of an unholy mess created by his predecessor Jacob Zuma and his multiple cronies in and out of the governing African National Congress (ANC). The particularly odious Gupta family have loomed large in what a succession of research projects, commissions of inquiry, books and investigative journalism projects, have labelled state capture.
Nene was formerly regarded as “clean”, having been fired by former President Zuma for refusing to fund his more ludicrous rent-seeking projects. He was replaced by Des van Rooyen for a weekend, and then left in the cold while Pravin Gordhan became Finance Minister (before in turn being fired by Zuma). Nene was rehabilitated by Ramaphosa – who defeated the entire Zuma strategy by winning the ANC (and then national) presidency. Nene’s reinstatement as Minister of Finance was widely regarded as both politically astute and market-friendly.
But then Nene dropped two bombshells: one, that he had met the Gupta brothers at their homes and offices between 2010 and 2014, but had not shared this with Ramaphosa; two, that he had refused to sign off a nuclear deal with Russia that would have simply broken the country financially for decades to come.
And now he is gone.
Did anyone pause to reflect on the fact that after a decade of impunity, this was an act of decency and moral courage? Ignore the party colours, and look at the human being. That is clearly a test all South African politicians failed abysmally. If they have a conscience they clearly forgot to dust it off and use it.
Widespread guilt
Almost by definition, anyone who is found to have past dealings with the Guptas – themselves now safely ensconced in mansions abroad – is unclean. And by definition that includes huge swathes of the political and business classes, whom the Guptas seem to have variously seduced, corrupted, cajoled, threatened or by-passed, depending on the strength of character at stake.
The brilliance of their state capture project – laid out recently by the investigative journalists as well as various academics – is a roll-call of virtually every senior political figure in South Africa, alongside many business elites.
Some stood up – but a great many folded, seduced by cash or a crass Sun City family wedding invitation or rotten contracts.
Many are in parliament, some are in civil society, others in the private sector – including the consultancy firm KPMG, and UK-based now defunct PR comp