The Strategic Dialogue Group (SDG) welcomes the handover of the final sections of The Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture and their release by President Cyril Ramaphosa.

For over three years, the Commission heard harrowing testimonies from hundreds of witnesses. Many shed light on widespread corruption and the repurposing of various organs of State to serve private interests.

Most regrettably, the governing African National Congress (ANC) was complicit in the process either by commission or omission, which stood at variance with the interests of the people of South Africa whom the ANC led from apartheid bondage to freedom.

The Commission’s report provides the ANC with an opportunity to self -introspect and engage in an honest dialogue with the people about its commissions and omissions. The ANC cannot avoid this engagement because the nation as a whole and various other social and political actors are engaged in dialogue about the phenomenon and process of State capture, the Commission’s report and its implications as well as the role of the ANC, real and imagined. To avoid such an engagement would not only be a worst act of behaving like the proverbial ostrich. It would also cause further distance between the ANC and the people.

The Commission cost the South African taxpayer more than R1 billion. By the standards of any developing country, this is a considerable sum of money. In principle it could have been invested in other areas to fight the triple challenge of poverty, inequality and unemployment.

We raise the foregoing not to regurgitate familiar anti-Commission populist sentiment, but to underscore the point that the National Executive and relevant organs of State such as the Police Service and the National Prosecution Authority should give priority to the Commission’s Recommendations that call upon them to take steps either to correct policy wrongs or to act against persons alleged to have committed gross wrongs against the Republic.

The law must take its course without fear or favour!

The SDG will study the Commission’s Recommendations that bear on policy and constitutional prescripts and express itself in detail with respect to the most crucial. Because of the far-reaching nature of many of the Recommendations, we believe that the Government should convene a widespread process of consultation with the people of South Africa on various policy and constitutional recommendations. These include the election of the President of the Republic. Such recommendations will, in any event and if accepted, require the amendment of the Constitution of the Republic and must, if they are to succeed, be socialised across political parties and the population as a whole.

 

Issued by Strategic Dialogue Group