It’s a good thing the mining sector is in such rude health, not besieged by, say, a phalanx of mafia-style protection rackets, or under attack from armies of AK47-wielding zama zamas.
Evidently, this is what mining minister Gwede Mantashe seems to think, as he last week dropped the Joburg Indaba, where he was to deliver the keynote address, at the last minute.
As a crisp message to his constituency, Mantashe couldn’t have made it clearer. No surprise that Bernard Swanepoel, the former CEO of Harmony Gold, didn’t mince his words, describing Mantashe’s no-show as “arrogance”.
As luck would have it, at the very moment he was due to speak, Mantashe was boasting on Twitter how he would be kicking off the ANC’s Letsema campaign in the Western Cape to restore the party’s “relevance, capability and credibility”.
It turned out to be a visit that was entirely in character with the “credibility” of the ANC. On Friday, Mantashe spent a day in Lambert’s Bay, about 250km north of Cape Town, ahead of a critical by-election set to take place this week.
Pointedly, while Mantashe was visiting Lambert’s Bay resident Gert Johannes Beukes, who turned 81 that day, journalists saw him hand over cash.
When asked about the R200 notes he dished out, Mantashe played this down: this was “not a bribe — it’s a birthday present”, given to someone “in need”, he said.
Which seems hard to swallow. A cynic might suggest that Mantashe simply misconstrued this as a “buy-election”, and was just doing his bit to help the party.
After all, nothing has happened to other ANC officials who have done the same in the past.
How could Mantashe … not know better? Did he learn nothing from his brush with the Zondo commission?
Last year, Paul Mashatile, the ANC’s treasurer-general, was captured on video handing out cash to people in a church ahead of the local government elections. Implausibly, Mashatile tried to argue that he was merely handing out money to “team members” to “donate” to the church.
Opposition parties were furious at this. COPE demanded that the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) act, because otherwise, spokesperson Dennis Bloem told The Citizen, “tomorrow another party will do the same with impunity”.
Vote buying isn’t that rare globally, with claims made frequently of similar practices across Latin America and even the US. In Afrobarometer surveys of 18 African countries in 2019 and 2020, 18% of people reported that they were “offered food, a gift, or money in exchange for their vote”.
But in SA, the practice clearly contravenes the code of conduct in the Municipal Electoral Act. Section 9 says no person may “offer any inducement or reward to another person” to join a party, attend a political event or vote in a particular way.
You’d expect the IEC to be all over this.
But when the FM asked the elections watchdog about this, its lily-livered response was that it is “not aware of any party [or] person who has made a complaint” about any contravention of the code of conduct.
Helen Zille, the DA’s federal council chair, tells the FM that handing out R200 notes in this way “is a serious violation of the code”, so the DA will lay “a complaint with the IEC and take the case to the Electoral Court”.
No doubt Mantashe will argue that the cash wasn’t meant to “induce anyone”.
But Werner Horn, the DA’s liaison with the IEC, tells the FM that there are two problems with that argument.
“First, the ANC did not only invite known, committed supporters to the event, and second, we have witnesses who confirm that with the handing out of the money, other people in ANC regalia went to the beneficiaries to tell them that the money was to ensure they vote for the ANC,” he says.
And that, you’d think, would be a clear violation of the electoral code.
Either way, how could Mantashe, who is no greenhorn in the field of politics, not know better? Did he learn nothing from his brush with the Zondo commission into state capture, where he was lambasted for accepting R600,000 worth of “security upgrades” to two of his homes from Bosasa as a gift?
Raymond Zondo, now chief justice, said this appeared to be a “gratuity”, and that there is a “reasonable prospect that further investigation will uncover a prima facie case against Mantashe in respect of the offence of corruption”.
At the time, interestingly, Mantashe used a similar argument to the one he is using now, which was that Bosasa director Papa Leshabane offered to install the system as a “family friend”.
Said Mantashe: “We help one another in dealing with a number of projects — if Mantashe is going to get married we come together and contribute — the questions that you are asking now do not arise. We are in a family traditional arrangement [in which] people make contributions.”
You know the drill: it’s just “family” helping each other out; it’s just “birthday money” — nothing to see here.
At the time of the Bosasa “gift”, Mantashe wasn’t a cabinet minister but the ANC’s secretary-general. Now he’s leading a critical portfolio in government, which makes the ethics of that cash handout all the more serious.
At the Joburg Indaba, Swanepoel joked that Mantashe would have to be well-versed in raising the dead were he hoping to reinvigorate the ANC’s prospects in the Western Cape.
If his antics this week are a guide to how the party plans to restore its “relevance” in the province, hold onto your hats.
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