The ANC vs Treasury

For some time now, the fraught relationship between President Jacob Zuma and former finance minister Pravin Gordhan has been depicted in binary terms.

The divide is ideological and the picture painted is this: On the one hand, there is Zuma, beholden to a nefarious third party, morally compromised and vested in nothing more than promoting his own agenda. On the other hand, there is Gordhan, the last bulwark against economic populism and a servant of the public’s best interests.

The former is the villain; the latter the reluctant hero or victim — whichever circumstances dictate a more appropriate description.There is evidence to support these two descriptions. However, you could certainly argue that Gordhan has, for decades, been entirely complicit in the damage the ANC has wrought. As with many in the ANC, it is only recently that he has stumbled across his moral conscience or, at least, chosen to make an issue of it.

Nevertheless, so powerful is this paradigm, it is hard to imagine any other forces playing a part in the president’s decision. It has been framed as the quintessential battle between “good” and “evil” and almost every piece of public analysis on it has been moulded to fit that particular narrative.

There are some things, however, that do not fit the mould.Why, for example, did Gordhan endorse radical economic transformation? It has widely been interpreted as a euphemism for Zuma’s private interests, and the ideological excuse for appointing Malusi Gigaba in Gordhan’s place. To endorse it, surely, would be to sanction his own execution?

But Gordhan has been explicit on the subject. “President Zuma articulated this intent in the state of the nation address, rightly emphasising the radical nature of the socioeconomic transformation we need,” he said before his budget vote.He added: “Unless we are indeed transformative and ... radical in the sense that we get to the roots of the problem and in the sense that we lend a new sense of urgency to bring about economic change and greater levels of social justice, we won’t be solving SA’s problems.”

How do you square that circle?

A possible answer lies in a far more insidious influence on the relationship between the two: the way in which power is structured inside the ANC and the internal organisational culture it engenders.

Besides the president, the ANC does not distinguish between members of the executive. The minister of sport and the minister of finance each exists solely to implement ANC policy

Because it is not a modern political party, more a liberation movement held hostage to a predemocratic ethos, ministers are conceived of as no more than mere functionaries.

Besides the president, the ANC does not distinguish between members of the executive. The minister of sport and the minister of finance are the same, each existing solely to implement ANC policy. They are not autonomous and, in their respective roles, they certainly cannot act as a check or balance on ANC power.It seems they are there to open doors — not to guard them, and never to close them.

Yet the nature of SA’s constitutional state runs in the opposite direction.

Treasury is by its very nature a check and balance on power. It is designed to set, monitor and uphold the standards for revenue collection and expenditure and it is granted enormous powers as a result — almost that of a state within a state. It can limit spending, expand budgets or withhold them, place governments under administration and conduct its own investigations.In his time at treasury, Gordhan had exercised all of these roles, placing Limpopo under administration, threatening municipalities in arrears to Eskom, implementing austerity measures and, controversially, monitoring illicit tobacco trade. That some of these overlapped or undermined the financial interests of the Gupta family is merely a coincidence.Put someone in charge of that apparatus with just a vague sense of loyalty to the institution or a sense of independence and the scene is automatically set for a showdown. Gordhan has those attributes and more besides — a sense of self-importance that sometimes borders on the arrogant.

Two quotes from the reshuffle furore speak to the ANC’s understanding of power and the finance ministry.

The first was ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe’s observation that a newspaper article that referred to Gordhan as a potential president influenced Zuma’s thinking. “If you remember that article,” Mantashe said, “you will appreciate the tensions between a minister and a president.”

Gigaba used his first press conference to say the following: “Where I stand, I get called and instructed as to changes that are going to take place. I don’t ask questions. I simply comply with the instructions given to me. Gigaba, like former finance minister David Des van Rooyen before him, knows his place. Both open doors on demand. That is their job.

There is a strong argument to be made that Zuma, regardless of his private interests, and even if he were widely loved and his performance as president commendable, would have fired Gordhan anyway.

This is simply because the ANC does not tolerate anyone who acts or gives the impression they manage a parallel authority to the president, himself no more than a proxy for the ANC’s agenda.

Seen in this light, Gordhan’s endorsement of radical economic transformation makes more sense.

It was, in his final days in charge, an attempt to demonstrate that he remained loyal to the ANC’s programme of action, as any ANC cadre must. It was, however, too little, too late.

Likewise, it explains why the national working committee was prepared to accept Zuma’s decision.

The first rule of ANC fight club is: the ANC always comes first.

So much political analysis in SA, and particularly of the ANC, suffers from the cult of personality. There is a tendency to ignore or downplay the nature of the beast itself in favour of the individual at the heart of any conflict or controversy. Personal dynamics have come to substitute any appreciation of the ANC and the authoritarian culture it espouses. This isn’t to say the politics of personality don’t matter. They are important; only they are not the be-all and end-all.

The fallout between Gordhan and Zuma is important, as are the reasons why, but there is a deeper, more fundamental problem that underpins it: the conflict between the ANC’s conception of its role in society and the nature of our constitutional state.

This was as much a conflict between Gordhan and Zuma as it was between the idea of a treasury and the ANC’s obsession with unfettered power.

Trevor Manuel could run a centrist economic programme of action as finance minister because he and then president Thabo Mbeki were of one mind. In turn, Mbeki defined the ANC.

But the ANC under Zuma is a very different animal. It has embraced populism and, while it feigns radicalism, it has definitely become more socialist in nature. In a socialist regime, treasury is there to facilitate — not question. Those are the rules. And everyone must play by them.

Van Rooyen, following Zuma’s lead, put it best in 2015. “I want to make the treasury more accessible to all South Africans,” he said. In this vein, Gigaba now has a grip on the assets of the Public Investment Corp and procurement. And they will be bent, first and foremost, to the ANC’s economic agenda.

Of course, Zuma’s private interests and his relationship with the Gupta family are of grave concern. They have their claws deep into his flesh and that of his acolytes. But it  is a mistake to reduce this problem to

simply that. What Zuma has done is purge government not of his enemies, but of independence. He has reduced the standing of treasury inside the party and the status of the finance minister in turn.

In years to come, as ministers like Gigaba leave their deferential mark on treasury’s own organisational culture, the constitutional prescripts that define it are what will suffer most.

SA is still learning what it is to be a constitutional democracy. The problem is the teacher. That we learn anything at all is inevitably by default — the by-product of some ANC impulse that runs in the other direction.

For the foreseeable future, treasury will now unlearn everything it has been taught for 20 years.