DAVID LEWIS | It’s trust in institutions, stupid! – Business Day

Columnist
When, after a particularly abject performance, Bafana Bafana lost the opening game of the World Cup, one wise football fan posted on X: “Eish, we need Madlanga on this. Serious.”
Serious indeed, Bro. I mean, who else can we trust? Gayton McKenzie? Hide the silverware! “Dr” Danny Jordaan? Lock up your daughters! Fifa? Hell no!
There are moments — increasingly rare — when South Africa truly rises to the occasion. The Madlanga commission’s performance is one such moment.
I once had the rare privilege of briefly working with Mbuyiseli Madlanga before he rose many rungs higher. As his leadership of the commission shows, he manages to combine extraordinary tough-mindedness and learning with unfailing courtesy. One can’t help but trust him.
I don’t doubt — plain for all to see — that Madlanga’s co-commissioners and the commission’s staff are also outstanding professionals and individuals. But I’m equally certain that this is what we get when someone of Madlanga’s calibre is appointed to lead an important institution or process. How many other leaders of public institutions do you trust?
That’s why we can’t overcome corruption; why our law enforcement institutions have collapsed; why there’s so much division and conflict in every public institution one can name; why no commitment made by a government leader, or indeed by a lowly official, is believed.
It’s trust, stupid!
It’s no coincidence that the most basic definition of corruption is “conduct by a person entrusted with public powers or responsibility that violates the public trust by using that power for an improper purpose or private advantage”.
Take the recent proceedings of the Madlanga commission. Advocate Andrea Johnson, former head of the Investigating Directorate Against Corruption (Idac), was in the witness box. The central issue concerned the appointment of an applicant for a managerial position at the rank of brigadier in the crime intelligence unit of the South African Police Service (SAPS).
A simple administrative matter, you might think. What about this could possibly interest Idac, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) unit responsible for investigating and prosecuting serious corruption in South Africa? Why was it taking up the valuable time of the Madlanga commission, charged with examining allegations of criminal infiltration of the SAPS?
The answer is that there’s nothing simple about the decisions and actions initiated by and arising from people, institutions and processes that aren’t trusted. That’s why judges, advocates, researchers, journalists and the public are all seized with uncovering the hidden agendas underlying what, on the face, is a simple administrative matter.
Several institutions and processes are implicated in Johnson’s evidence. There’s crime intelligence, a vital instrument in investigating organised crime and corruption that was previously headed by Richard Mdluli, Jacob Zuma’s first appointment. He had approached Zuma, requesting the appointment in exchange for his promise to support the newly elected president, an act of organised crime if ever there was one, not to speak of the murder and rampant looting of crime intelligence’s vast secret funds, in which he was implicated.
Could you possibly trust crime intelligence when contemporary reports suggest that the looting has continued unabated? I think not. But crime intelligence is part of the SAPS, and, though its operations are conducted in secret, they are subject to the disciplines and rules that govern the police. Surely this will constrain their worst excesses?
Do you trust the police? Give me a break! In the past 30 years only one SAPS commissioner has served a full term of office, all the others having left under a cloud. The current commissioner (set up, it seems, by Idac, a fellow law enforcement agency) and one of his deputies are suspended from their posts.
Robert Mark, a former head of Scotland Yard, once said, “The basic test of a decent police force is to catch more criminals than it employs.” Do you trust the senior officer corps of the SAPS to pass this test?
But hold on, the parliamentary intelligence committee oversees our intelligence structures. In secret. If the chaos and dysfunction of our intelligence community, including the CI, are anything to go by, they’ve not done a great job. I hope none of the members of parliament who belong in prison serve on this committee.
Parliamentary oversight is, at best, high-level and unconcerned with simple administrative matters such as the appointment of a manager in crime intelligence. Talking of which, do you trust the selection committee that made the appointment in the first place? I don’t know how an intelligence agency selects its employees.
If you believe John le Carré (I do), for MI6 this happened over a good claret in Cambridge because they thought they could trust the patriotism of the upper class. Bad mistake. I’ve no idea how this crime intelligence appointment was conducted. I do, however, know that the strategic appointment of government personnel was the most effective instrument utilised by the Zuma/Gupta syndicate in the capture of the state.
And not only the highest-level personnel. In the early days of Corruption Watch, reports received revealed that the person responsible for procurement in the smallest Free State dorpie was appointed from the premier’s office.
The Madlanga commissioners consulted the CV of the successful candidate. They are impressed by the appointee’s formal qualifications, as am I. But we know the capacity for mistrust is not laid to rest there. We know how frequently CVs are fraudulent and how frequently degrees and diplomas are fabricated.
And so, we’re told, Johnson and her colleagues decided to initiate a series of criminal investigations into a number of crime intelligence officials from the head downwards. They tried to squeeze it into a statement made by someone who sounds extremely untrustworthy. But they did it so incompetently that the alert commissioners dug deeper. It led them to ask whether there was not a “hidden hand” guiding Idac prosecutions.
Who knows? Maybe it was just a product of Johnson’s overly suspicious mind. Maybe it was more sinister than that. Johnson’s husband is a KwaZulu-Natal-based brigadier in crime intelligence. I don’t know where he stands in this hopelessly divided organisation. I do know that were I in Johnson’s position, I would not have touched this case with a proverbial barge pole. Why did she? Do you trust Johnson?
My point is not to cast aspersions on anyone. It is simply that you cannot run a primary school outing, a criminal gang, a 200,000-person police service or a national government on the basis of formal regulation alone. Personal relations and formalised rules of engagement — appointments, prosecutions, police investigations, judicial decision-making, business decisions and sports teams — have to be complemented by a degree of trust between the stakeholders.
In the words of the immortal Elvis Presley: We can’t go on together/ with suspicious minds/ And we can’t build our dreams/ on suspicious minds.
Trust is at an extremely low ebb in South Africa. Suspicion rules. It wasn’t always thus. Nelson Mandela inspired trust at arguably our most difficult moment.
The Madlanga commission is tasked with nothing less than beginning the process of building trust in the criminal justice system, the least trusted institutions of all. Thankfully people of the calibre of Andy Mothibi, recently appointed head of the NPA, and Firoz Cachalia, acting police minister, can pick up the baton.
I trust them. But if ever there was an “all of government, all of society” responsibility, it’s this one. Make no mistake, the country’s future depends on it. Serious.
• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a cofounder and director of Corruption Watch.
Business Day
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