For more than a year now deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo has been listening to all sorts of crooks lying under oath.
Without impugning the honour of Zondo and his colleagues trying to unravel the massive crime of state capture, the whole thing is becoming a tiring, hugely expensive gossip session, seemingly with no clear end in sight.
When the commission finally wraps up after another year, all it will give us is the truth. Expensive, useless truth. So far we have spent about R400m on the commission. To be sure, it will at some point make findings that some influential politicians, civil servants and other fraudsters masquerading as businesspeople committed acts of corruption against the state.
That is the truth we are paying for. Truth about the industrial-scale thieving that occurred in the years since Jacob Zuma became president … no, let’s get that right … since the days Zuma worked hard in the service of the Saxonwold Shebeen from the Union Buildings. Thus it is SA’s second truth & reconciliation commission (TRC). It will then recommend that these people be prosecuted for stealing billions from the state.
But at what cost? The truth Zondo will finally reveal will be as useless as the truth Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s TRC revealed in huge volumes. And of course, just like the truth Tutu and his colleagues worked so hard for years to place before a traumatised nation late in the 1990s, the truth Zondo will eventually reveal is already known to us all.
So what is SA supposed to do with an expensive document telling us what we already know? At best, Zondo will recommend there be criminal prosecutions for the crimes against the people. But those recommendations will go unheeded. The guilty will still be free, stealing more and boasting about it, as they do now on social media.
With due respect to the honourable judge, the commission is an academic exercise that will not deliver justice to us, the people, the victims of corruption presided over by Zuma and his cronies. In the absence of criminal prosecutions for the corruption, whatever Zondo’s findings, SA will continue to sink into an abyss of corruption. With all his best intentions and sense of justice, there’s nothing Zondo can do about that.
Similar exercises elsewhere – though admittedly into crimes against humanity – resulted in real consequences for the perpetrators. For instance, the US government never wavered in its pursuit of Osama bin Laden, alleged mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, until it cornered and killed him.
As a result, many Americans feel a sense of justice for the loss of 3,000 of their compatriots. The point is that there were consequences, as there should be for the crimes of state capture even if they cannot be equated with crimes against humanity.
Sadly, after Zondo is done, all those guilty will still be addressing rallies as free men, and enjoying their ill-gotten gains in the sea of poverty around them. We, the people, will continue to bear the burden of the crimes. The billions in hard-earned taxpayers’ money again dished out this week to reward the corruption that has destroyed the SABC, and to arms manufacturer Denel last month, are only part of the billions yet to be paid over to Eskom, SAA, and PetroSA.