Rob Hersov argues South Africa's new anti-corruption report is another toothless blueprint. The ANC won't dismantle the patronage networks that keep it in power, and new agencies won't matter without prosecutions. Ordinary South Africans pay the price: collapsing state companies, water shortages, unemployment, and crime.
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Breaking news! South Africa has a new plan to tackle corruption. Yes, another one. Because clearly, the problem here has been a simple lack of plans. Not the theft, not the looting, not the political impunity. No, it's the shortage of PDFs. Enter the National Anti-Corruption Advisory Council, or NACAC, which after 3 years has produced a 1,000-page work of plans. It proposes a shiny new anti-corruption utopia with an Office of Public Integrity and Anti-Corruption, the OPI, which apparently will swoop in as enthusiastically as a cadre does to a tender and dismantle patronage networks, digitise procurement, and even use artificial intelligence to track stolen billions in milliseconds. Well, the ANC has no intelligence, so how are they going to even understand AI? Forgive me if I don't break into applause just yet, because we have, of course, been here before. There was another commission, remember? The Zondo Commission. 4 years, a billion rand, thousands of pages, and crucially, names. We know exactly who signed the dodgy contracts. We know which companies benefited, and we know which politicians pretended not to notice. Cyril? And yet, well, you know the story. Nothing happened. But according to the NACAC report, this time we can really do it. This time, the same government workers and politicians who were in place at the time of state capture, they will allow for the building of a gleaming new super agency, the OPI, to coordinate investigations and bring the corrupt to justice. Most of them are the corrupt. To believe any of this, you'd have to believe the ANC intends to dismantle the very patronage machine that it built and which has kept it in power for over 3 decades. Spineless Cyril Ramaphosa came to office promising reform, but his new dawn quickly turned into a new yawn. Same old, same old. And every time the moment comes to act, to purge corrupt cadres, to hold ministers accountable, to dismantle networks of patronage, Cyril blinks. He stalls. He appoints a task team, or better yet, he appoints a commission. Anything really to avoid dealing with the issue. This isn't leadership, it's choreography by a useless spineless Cyril. Look at KZN. In July, Lieutenant General Mkhwanazi alleged that organised criminal syndicates had infiltrated the police, intelligence agencies, and even the judiciary. Ramaphosa's response? Another Commission of Inquiry. More meetings, more delays, more uselessness. Meanwhile, violent crime spirals out of control in our country, and the public's trust in policing collapses even further. And NACAC's entire blueprint rests on a single laughable assumption: that the ANC-led government is willing to restrain itself. That the ANC, having perfected the art of self-enrichment and stealing, will now voluntarily neuter its own networks of power. The ANC supporters of this magical plan point to progress already underway. We've got a permanent Investigating Directorate Against Corruption, a shiny new Public Procurement Act, draft whistleblower protections on the horizon. Wonderful, isn't it? We are drowning in laws, swimming in acronyms, and suffocating under frameworks. And yet, we remain a country where whistleblowers are assassinated in their driveways, and the masterminds of those murders are still amongst us, some of them cabinet ministers. But by all means, let's add another office, another policy, another layer of bureaucracy. I'm sure that'll work. The real problem isn't the absence of laws. It's the absence of enforcement. It's the total capture of the institutions meant to enforce those laws. The NPA is underfunded, understaffed, and overly politicised. SAPS crime intelligence has been gutted. The Hawks, the SIU, IPID, they don't cooperate, they sabotage each other. And the NACAC report wants us to believe they'll suddenly work in harmony, as if South Africa's security agencies are a church group organising a cake sale. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. And meanwhile, ordinary South Africans know exactly what this failure costs: collapsing state-owned enterprises, a lack of local and international investment, dry taps, spiralling unemployment, and a violent crime rate that turns neighbourhoods into fortresses. This is our South Africa, thanks to the ANC. But instead of consequences, we get commissions. Instead of arrests, we get acronyms. Perhaps spineless Cyril Ramaphosa should press-stick this line from Tacitus above his desk, if he ever goes to his desk: "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." South Africa has plenty of laws and a terminal lack of will to implement them. NACAC's report is not a roadmap. It's an obituary for the idea that the ANC can ever police itself. It catalogues the rot in exquisite detail, then quietly hands it back to the very people who benefit from that rot. And so nothing's going to change because nothing can change. Until wrongdoers face prison cells instead of panel discussions. And until then, NACAC's report, like Zondo's before it, will crawl along just as slowly, enough for Ramaphosa to posture as a reformer while dumping real accountability into his successor, who will in all likelihood already be tainted. And that, I'm afraid, is the plan. Futsack, surreal rumba pose.
