The Covid19 crisis has already exposed some of capitalism’s most heinous crimes against humanity and our planet; horrors that continue to mount but that the capitalists and their guardians mystify without shame.
Gaping health and education inequalities, for instance, are but the symptoms of a social system set on dumping humanity into barbarism. Covid19 has not just laid bare the scale of squalor afflicting the labouring majority but also multiplied the suffering of tens of millions of workers and peasants. Rising mass protests against the hardships that this pandemic is aggravating have been criminalised with governments instructing their armed forces to crush these revolts with savage violence.
South Africa has failed to escape the devastation of the Covid19 pandemic. Contrary to the optimistic spin that government and its handpicked scientific apologists have been peddling, the country has surged into the league of severely ravaged coronavirus epicentres. Months before the onset of localised transmissions of this infectious disease, the Ramaphosa administration was floundering in its efforts to block the spread of SARS-Cov-2 in hospitals, shopping malls, police stations and prisons. Uncontrollable infections in poor communities, especially in schools, fuelled by dilapidated infrastructure, exposed the hollowness of their ‘disaster response’ policies and regulations. What more evidence do we need about the scale of destruction to public healthcare and education – invariably imposed on the exploited and impoverished majority – due to decades of neoliberal austerity?
At best, conflicting statements of the ‘National Covid19 Command Council (NCCC)’ and disparate ministries epitomise their disastrous, chaotic and misguided knee-jerk guidelines. Ministers regularly contradict each other on Covid19 measures, with some embarrassing Ramaphosa through their violations of physical distancing rules and movement restrictions while boasting of their exploits via social media. Competitors of the ANC inside national and provincial parliaments have seized on this colossal mess to score political points against the ANC. However, these rivals, particularly the Democratic Alliance governing the Western Cape, are incapable of solving this crisis in the interests of the labouring majority.
‘Ramapreneurism’: Plunder Covid19 Tenders
As their catastrophic mismanagement of this health, socio-ecological and economic disaster teeter along, corruption scandals in Covid19 procurement tenders exploded in media headlines. Thus, ‘covidpreneurs’, a sub-species of tender tycoons or ‘tenderpreneurs’, shot to popularity overnight, determined to enrich themselves from the disaster, Who got caught out in this looting and what is its broader political significance?
To date, the headline scandals involve mainly high-profile members of the ANC and/or their families. Looters featuring in the headlines range from the Gauteng Health MEC to the spokesperson in the presidency to the sons of the ANC Secretary General. The malfeasance includes inflating the prices of substandard Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) supplied to public hospitals and Covid19 community information campaigns. Commentators with insider information say that the headlines just reveal the tip of the corruption iceberg.
One of President Ramaphosa’s sons, infamous for his involvement in the Bosasa scandal, is another Covid19-profiteer through a deal with First National Bank. This standout protégé of ‘Ramapreneurism’ and his business partner “recruited waste pickers and car guards to spray taxi commuters with disinfectants before boarding taxis. But by the end of May, the pair identified that spraying people in the taxi rank alone was not enough and have now opted for Covid-19 compliant technology in taxis instead.” (Business Insider, 27 July 2020) Junior Ramaphosa ignominiously touts the installation of highly questionable plastic ventilator spacers in taxi windows for better airflow inside the taxi as an innovation!
Whitewashing Indelible Looting
In early August, after the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, the Secretary General issued the umpteenth condemnation of all forms of corruption. Outraged and embarrassed by the latest corruption scandals, this NEC statement once again commits the party to fight “corruption through prevention and punishment”. Supposedly a resolute declaration of ‘war on corruption involving its own members’, this claptrap is a hallmark of ANC duplicity. It evades the urgency to uproot corruption and its underlying causes. Instead, allegations will be investigated through powerless and compromised ‘integrity and ethics’ committees. None of the known fraudsters, steadfastly defending their right to a ‘fair hearing’, will be expelled or asked to resign from the ANC. The NEC statement merely regurgitates an old cliché: “those who loot public resources must face the might of the law.”
Government officials caught red-handed in this theft have been suspended, insisting that they are innocent until proven guilty. Upon admission of guilt, the disgraced member might issue a public apology for bringing the ANC into disrepute and looting the derisory fiscal allocation to combat Covid19.
Plundering the paltry health budget through fraudulent Covid19 tenders is generally seen as morally disgusting. Diehard liberals, cheerleaders of a social system based on theft and plunder, would usually shout loudest that corruption is a moral crime. But it is short-sighted and deceptive to reduce the abuse of a government position for self-enrichment to a moral problem. The liberals reason as if capitalism works according to ‘sacred morals’. Capitalism has no abstract morality, forcing its liberal guardians to protect the system through a violation of their own moral commands: lies and obfuscation. So much for the limits and contradictions of bourgeois morality!
No matter how catchy the anti-corruption rhetoric of the ANC integrity sideshows, Zondo Commissions or liberal moralists, none offers a working class solution to the Covid19 fraud. This populist chorus, on the contrary, seeks to deflect and suppress a working class alternative from emerging as the Covid19 tender scandals and others unfold. Any genuine alternative must begin with a fundamental question: why has the rot become so widespread and irreversible within the ANC?
The rot arises from the ANC’s ideology to further the aspirations of the black middle class. This aspirant black bourgeoisie leading the ANC wants to be giant capitalists; a logic which compels them to accumulate private wealth by any means necessary. Founded upon political double-dealing, it is therefore not surprising why the Ramaphosa-Mboweni brand of entrepreneurism differs only cosmetically from the Zuma-Gupta, EFF-VBS or Miamane-Steinhoff debacles.
Indeed, the ineptness of the ANC to hide its corrupt activities does not mean that other bourgeois parties are not defrauding the state through privatisation and other self-enrichment crimes. Each corruption scandal further brings into the public eye the fact that criminality, expected from underworld gangsters, is the norm among corporate bosses and its state functionaries. It shows that capitalism is incapable of hiding its crimes against humanity. Capitalism has become an anachronistic mode of social organisation and its victims must replace it with democratic ecosocialism.