After Apartheid: Reinventing South Africa?

Anticorruption Reforms in Democratic South Africa

Anticorruption Reforms in Democratic South Africa Marianne Camerer Weeks before South Africa’s fourth democratic election, acting National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) boss Mokotedi Mpshe announced on 6 April 2009 that all charges of corruption against African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma would be dropped: “I have come to the difficult conclusion that it is neither possible nor desirable for the NPA to continue with the prosecution.”1 While the timing may have raised some eyebrows, this “difficult conclusion” allowed South Africa’s new president to take up the reins of office without the indignity of corruption charges hanging over his head. The corruption charges against President Zuma stemmed from an investigation into his relationship with his financial adviser and Durban-based businessman, Schabir Shaik. A lengthy public trial finalized four years earlier , in June 2005, saw Shaik sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In terms of the charge sheet, the other party to the corruption and bribery charges for which Shaik was jailed was Jacob Zuma. On 14 June 2005, in what many wrongly predicted as Zuma’s political demise, Thabo Mbeki rather unceremoniously fired his deputy president, stating to a joint sitting of the National Assembly that “the court has made findings against the accused and at the same time pronounced on how these matters relate to our Deputy President, the Hon Jacob Zuma, raising questions of conduct that would be inconsistent with expectations that attend those who hold public office.”2 Interestingly, this act would signal Mbeki’s own political death knell: he would be defeated in his quest to continue in office as ANC president at the ANC conference in Polokwane (December 270 Marianne Camerer 2007) and in an unprecedented turn of events would be recalled by the ANC as president of South Africa in September 2008, six months before completing his second term of office. On Tuesday, 3 March 2009, South Africans woke up to the news that convicted fraudster Schabir Shaik, after serving just over two years of the fifteen-year sentence, mostly in private hospitals, had walked free the night before on medical grounds.3 (He has subsequently applied for a presidential pardon.) Shaik’s release followed a controversial decision by the parole board, for in terms of the law, medical parole should be given only in terminally ill cases. On 22 October 2009 the Mercury reported that Shaik had been seen playing a round of golf on the Papwa Sewgolum Course in Reservoir Hills, Durban.4 Just over a month later, in April 2009, the charges against Zuma were dropped. Alleged political interference into the corruption investigation by overzealous NPA bosses loyal to former president Thabo Mbeki and alleged abuses involving power and political conspiracies were given as reasons for the charges being dropped. The information of political interference came to light in tapes made available to Zuma’s defense team by seemingly sympathetic intelligence agencies. It is not clear at this stage whether the tapes were legally obtained. Three years earlier Zuma, his defense lawyers, and supporters had argued that the charges brought against him by the NPA were part of a “political conspiracy.” In a 2006 affidavit submitted to oppose a prosecution request for a postponement in his corruption trial, Zuma argued that the investigation was “designed solely or mainly to destroy my reputation and political role. . . . My conviction on any possible type of offence is being pursued at all costs. . . . I have been touted as a potential presidential candidate. . . . Just as there are . . . ANC members who have come out in support of me being the next president, so there are those in public and in government who are very much opposed to me being president and indeed some who wish me not to have a role to play in the politics of this country. . . . The charges against me have been initiated, and certainly fuelled, by a political conspiracy to remove me as a role player in the ANC.”5 At Polokwane, where Zuma won his decisive victory to head the ANC, a decision was taken to disband the “Scorpions,” the elite unit of prosecutionled investigators alleged to have been targeting Mbeki’s political enemies. Widely regarded as South Africa’s most effective anticorruption unit, the Directorate of Special Operations—the Scorpions—was set up by Mbeki ten Anticorruption Reform Efforts 271 years ago, in 1999, when he came to of...