Recently, I’ve been engrossed in Hennie van Vuuren’s book, Apartheid Guns and Money, an eye-opening, insightful read into the inner workings and machinations of the apartheid state as well as the private and corporate interests that propped it up, even when it was supposedly isolated and an international pariah.
The book is interesting on so many levels, but one of the things that I found so interesting about it, is that it totally debunks the myth that corruption in South Africa is a post 1994, ANC creation, because it clearly shows how morally bankrupt the apartheid state was and how it relied on a criminal, underworld economy in order to survive.
It shows how the apartheid state was dependent on “respectable” international businesses and individuals in order to survive, despite its illegitimacy within the global geopolitical order. It also gives one a window into the very close links between what we now view as legitimate business people from the Afrikaans community who now run businesses of global impact and scale and the National Party, and how state procurement was used by the Nats to prop up these business people and their businesses, who now funnily enough in their current role as “legitimate business”, are the biggest critics of the ANC government and its propensity to give business opportunities to “cadres” as they call it. As controversial author Noam Chomsky says, “for the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.”
As a final note on this book, it also totally exposes the myth that the apartheid state was an efficient, effective machine that ran like clockwork, totally contrary and superior to what we are experiencing in contemporary SA and the fallacy that many in SA today consciously or subconsciously subscribe to that corruption is a racial phenomenon (anyway, I’ll save you from my “irritating racial diatribe” this week, as I know that’s what you think I’m all about, so just bear with me a minute).
These are some of the thoughts that have come to my mind as I have been going through this book, but apart from that, one of the things that it has done for me is to cause me to reflect a little more deeply on the highly noxious phenomenon of state capture in present day SA.
It has caused me to reflect on the fact that, in line with the testimony given by Lord Peter Hain at the State Capture Commission a few weeks ago, state capture and the economic crimes that result from it, is not possible without the facilitatory, enabling role played by the private sector and big international corporations.