Another scandal is shaking the Democratic Alliance (DA), the dominant parliamentary faction of old South African liberalism. A whistle-blower has revealed that the DA leader, Mr Musi Maimane, was a recipient and beneficiary of ‘tainted gifts’ from Steinhoff, a corporate empire guilty of large-scale fraud dating back to its Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) listing in 1998.

Steinhoff’s collapse in December 2017 destroyed roughly R20 billion that the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) and Government Employee Pension Fund (GEPF) had invested in its fraudulent schemes, theft legalised and hidden with intricate accounting machinations. Deloitte SA, Steinhoff’s auditors, is also under investigation for hiding the criminal accumulation of speculative debt until 2016, in effect wrecking the trustworthiness and squeaky clean image of auditing and accounting corporates. Commentators labelled Steinhoff, once a lavish sponsor of South African sports teams, the “greatest corporate swindler”, widely publicising the rampant criminality of this ‘Stellenbosch corporate mafia’. Markus Jooste, Steinhoff’s former Chief Executive, made a mockery of his parliamentary hearings on this mess, treating the politicians who dared question him with the ruthless contempt that a master has for servants who display the slightest disrespect for authority.

The DA leader, an evangelical preacher, denies any corrupt dealings, saying that he did not exchange political favours for Steinhoff’s gift, the Toyota Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV). Before Steinhoff’s fraud and collapse hit media headlines, Maimane apparently got a tipoff, ceased the usage of the SUV and returned it to the disgraced capitalist corporation. A DA faction at loggerheads with Maimane, evidently due to voters ditching the party for the neoliberal ANC and far-right Freedom Front Plus (FF+) in the May 2019 national and provincial elections, seized the Steinhoff SUV scandal for their own self-seeking ends to rid their party of its discredited leader. Musi Maimane insists that corporate mobsters did not “capture” him, lambasting some of his detractors for their hypocrisy.

What does this latest DA scandal tell the oppressed and exploited majority about how we should fight against corruption? First, our anti-corruption protests must connect the unmasking of and resistance against every symptom and manifestation of corruption to its roots in capitalism. Reducing Maimane’s saga to the ethical failings or sins of a pious man, or that of a liberally virtuous DA, Steinhoff or Markus Jooste, inevitably forces one into a false choice between bad and good capitalists. In fact, searching for the differences between Maimane’s vices and Ramaphosa’s Bosasa scandal or documented crimes under which the Zondo Commission on state capture is drowning, would be as futile as trying to find a needle in a haystack. Moreover, this intimate criminality between corporations and their politicians extends into the imperialist heartlands as mounting scandals of Donald Trump in America or Boris Johnson in England aptly demonstrate. As exposures of the Panama Papers in 2016 confirmed, robbery, extortion and other evils of the criminal underworld are inherent in so-called “legitimate profit-seeking”.

Secondly, the DA leader’s mess helps us to draw a bolder line between our genuine allies and enemies in this fight to uproot the social system which breeds dispossession, labour exploitation and self-enrichment at the expense of society. Officially, the Democratic Alliance preaches the bourgeois liberal morals of   “enlightenment” when capitalism was violently overthrowing pre-capitalist modes of social organisation (like feudalism) and imposing its own domination. Today, capitalism is dragging humanity into barbarism through its wars, global warming, ecological devastation, economic crises, socio-cultural decay, fascism and exclusion of the oppressed and exploited from direct political representation. The fundamentalist faith that reigns supreme in DA ideology rejects the reality that capitalism with its political rule has become an obstacle to social progress. Its programme for an ‘open opportunity society’ is a ploy to rally uninformed voters behind a party of and for capitalism. This political slogan defends the dog-eats-dog savagery of capitalist competition. Diehard racial supremacists, anti-working class elites and worshippers of colonialism, like Helen Zille, control what the DA stands for and how it operates. Throughout its history this political party has demonstrated that it stands in direct and irreconcilable opposition to the demands and aspirations of the labouring majority.