Government is undermining the public’s belief in itself and the criminal justice system by failing to act swiftly against overwhelming evidence of corruption in its midst. Hollow promises, especially with regard to land reform, are only making things worse.
For the public to maintain faith in the criminal justice system, or public administration in general, it needs to see government officials suspected of crimes investigated, charged and convicted. Those found guilty of lesser offences like incompetence and mismanagement must be booted out to make way for better-quality civil service candidates.
A failure on government’s part to act promptly and decisively against bad apples in its midst erodes confidence in the belief that we are all equal before the law. We immediately get images of backroom deals being hatched between investigators, prosecutors and party bosses. This is reinforced when a case against a politician, which appears to be going nowhere, suddenly gets a new lease on life when they fall out of favour. The implication is clear – the powerful and those they protect are above the law.
Announcing an investigation, as agriculture minister Lulama Xingwana is fond of doing, is not the same as taking action. This month, she announced unproductive land reform beneficiaries should be booted off their farms to make way for more energetic cultivators of the soil and promised to investigate officials and farmers suspected of mismanaging project funds. “Action will be taken against those found guilty,” she promised.
A week later, she invited journalists to a function at a derelict ostrich project in Gauteng as part of her “back to the land” campaign to revitalise failed land reform farms. “No farm must be allowed to lie fallow,” she told the assembled audience.
I first met Xingwana on a farm near Potchefstroom in North West province soon after she took office in 2006. The occasion was two-fold. The Motingoe and Mosweu families, whose forebears had been booted off their land under apartheid, were getting it back at last. And Xingwana was launching her nationwide “back to the land” campaign.
She told me she’d grown up on a small-scale farm in rural Transkei. “In those days, people believed in land,” she said. “They worked on the land, they had their cattle on the land, beans from the fields, pumpkins, fresh vegetables. Everybody had something to eat. What we’re saying as we give out land is, let’s go back to the land to plough, produce, fight hunger and poverty, create wealth and jobs.”
She promised to achieve this by releasing unused state land, including in or near towns, beefing up support for resettled farmers in the form of state-funded farm infrastructure development, subsidised micro-finance and input provision and deploying an army of highly motivated and technically skilled extension officers. Exactly two days earlier, on 21 November, she announced that she had instructed the Public Service Commission (PSC) to investigate management failures responsible for service delivery problems in her land affairs department. She promised to take stern action against officials found guilty of “dragging their heels” – a euphemism for mismanagement.
I was impressed. Land delivery needed to increase tenfold a year to meet the target of transferring a third of white-owned land to blacks by 2014. The job of converting 16 million hectares of land in the former homelands to freehold tenure, which would unlock its enormous economic potential, had ground to a halt, leaving 21 million South Africans trapped in rural slums. Restitution claims lodged on farms had been stuck on someone’s desk for almost a decade, turning rural areas into poverty traps nobody would invest in. At last, someone was cracking the whip!
Two years later this depressing scenario has hardly changed except that the state has bought large numbers of farms to lease to blacks, which means it can show on paper that progress has been made in broadening access to land. These farms continue to fail, but rather than acknowledging this as a symptom of her poor leadership, Xingwana is increasingly shifting blame to the beneficiaries and a handful of officials.
We hear no more of the PSC probe that was supposed to fix these problems. Investigators promised to wrap up their work in 2007. They offered to discuss their findings with me once their report was submitted to Xingwana. After a year of enquiring about their progress, I’ve given up on ever seeing it, or believing it was ever meant to be implemented.
The same scenario played itself out at the Land Bank. In 2007, Xingwana announced with great fanfare that a forensic investigation had been launched into financial management at the bank. Deloitte & Touche spent months collecting enough evidence to launch criminal proceedings against several big fish and was paid R7,8 million for its efforts. The bank’s own investigators supplied Deloitte with plenty of ammunition.
The Land Bank’s current CEO Phakamani Hadebe tells me the police’s Serious Economic Offences Unit is looking into several cases arising out of the report. But to the best of my knowledge, not a single senior official it named has been charged to date.
Last year, we were subjected to a repeat performance. The bank’s former chief financial officer, Xolile Ncame, handed an explosive dossier to former chairperson Themba Langa pointing to serious irregularities in payments in a R100 million AgriBEE fund housed in the agriculture department and disbursed from a special fund in the Land Bank. Langa hired PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PWC) to look into evidence of corruption, saying at the time the Ncame dossier contained “prima facie evidence of fraud”. I’m told senior officials, including a prominent politician, were once again named in PWC’s report, which was completed last year. Investigators were provided with details of trust accounts where money was deposited for projects that either didn’t exist or never received all their funds. Again, I’m told all these transactions, which took place over about a year, were investigated by fraud detectives and some of them were forwarded to the Serious Economic Crimes Unit. But not a single criminal case has been opened.
There’s some truth in the excuse that our criminal investigation and prosecuting authorities have poor resources, are understaffed and overworked, especially in pursuing complex corruption cases that can drag on for years and cost a fortune. But in many of these cases, the evidence is overwhelming.
Government officials close to some of the investigations say the agriculture department has been supplied with more than enough evidence to lay charges against its officials, but has been reluctant to do so because of their political connections. With the elections looming, the fear increases that prosecutions would result in a political fallout, as lower-ranking fraudsters start outing their political protectors.
But officials must realise the long-term damage to the credibility of our leaders and democratic institutions is the greater evil. They must act now. Any further delay smacks of a political cover-up. Stephan Hofstätter is a Farmer’s Weekly contributing editor. |fw
