South African President Jacob Zuma, like Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has a propensity to break into song and dance. Both have faced corruption charges. However, while Zuma’s legal case was controversially dropped, Berlusconi has had to pass legislation to keep himself out of the dock.
While speculation is now rife that Zuma may grant a presidential pardon to Shabir Shaik, the businessman sentenced for having “a generally corrupt relationship” with him, in Italy, Berlusconi has proposed more laws to squash lingering fraud indictments against himself.
But, frankly, if members of the ruling African National Congress really want to peer into the future, they should send a fact-finding mission to Rome to study the fate of the Democrazia Cristiana party, which once seemed set to rule (in Zuma’s phrase) “till Jesus comes”. Even the backing of the Vatican couldn’t save the DC.
Exactly like the ANC, the Christian Democrats’ strength was their greatest weakness. They had such a broad constituency – from far right to extreme left – that at one point the party had six separate headquarters in Rome, representing the separate factions. The only thing that kept this disparate organisation together was the glue of power.
They also practiced “deployment”. Party loyalists were appointed to government agencies, state television and the powerful parastatals. Even minor appointments were often political. The consequence was paralysis, nepotism and rampant corruption.
Ministers were appointed in order to keep the different factions happy, rather than for ability. As a result, there was a revolving cabinet carousel, with the same dull faces appearing year after year in different posts. No one was ever sacked for incompetence.
As with the ANC, Christian Democrat factions were often more at war with each other than they were with the opposition. The different groupings traded insults openly and fought bitter internal battles for positions of influence. Frequently, as has proved the case here with intra-ANC battles, the state’s spy agencies were abused to settle party scores.
The major difference, however, is that the South African Communist Party is an integral part of the governing alliance – even if it is one that yaps at the heels of the ANC. In contrast, the only ideological aim of the Christian Democrats, apart from maintaining a clammy grip on power, was to keep the Italian Communists out in the cold.
Yet even here there are instructive similarities. After the Second World War, when the Christian Democrats came to power, they were briefly forced to include Communists in a unity government. However, Communist ministers, exactly as in South Africa today, soon discovered that they had to demonstrate their moderation. In 1947, as the Italian Prime Minister prepared to fly to the United States to meet President Harry Truman, Communist Finance Minister Mauro Scoccimarro stayed up all night to prepare a budget to show how, under “red” control, finances were being responsibly managed. In fact, the Prime Minister was flying to Washington to discuss with Truman how to dump the Communists.
The reason why all this would repay close study is that many of the tensions which confronted post-war Italy were precisely the ones that face South Africa today: the tension between modernity and tradition, the endemic poverty of the south leading to a dramatic and seemingly intractable split between rich and poor, and, of course, the sheer ruthlessness of organised crime. The way the Italian ruling class went about tackling these crucial social dilemmas would present a master class in exactly how not to solve such problems.
But the ANC is current repeating many of the same, potentially ruinous mistakes.
Last week, Zuma appointed notorious government “yes man” Menzi Simelane to head the National Prosecuting Authority – the very agency which could have re-instituted corruption charges against him. This appears to be a move of Berlusconian opportunism. A recent government commission found Simelane to be dishonest and lack integrity. But he’s a party hack, so just the man to block any embarrassing investigations.
The DC ruled for nearly 50 years, finally collapsing in the early 1990s in a putrid swamp of corruption. It only clung to power for so long by playing on the Communist scare. Ironically, this party disintegrated at the very same time as its red bogeyman.
The fact is that inventive Italians only managed to thrive despite their governments.
The danger for the ANC is to follow a similar route: gradually becoming ever more sclerotic and attracting only cynical careerists with an eye to looting state resources.
But perhaps the greatest warning is what follows such a final collapse. In the subsequent vacuum, the worst elements rise to the surface. In Italy, the greatest beneficiary of the rampant corruption of the 1980s and ’90s, Silvio Berlusconi bizarrely became Prime Minister on a wave of populism, governing with neo-fascists and strident xenophobes.
The equivalent scenario in South Africa would be: after his release from prison earlier this year on “health grounds”, Shabir Shaik is not only pardoned but survives into grand old age – long enough to outlive the ANC and its demise and so become President.
Don’t laugh. It happened in Italy.
