EDITORIAL | It seems donations to the ANC are just another form of kickback

Shell started its seismic survey off the Wild Coast on December 8, and the following day mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe made his bizarre comments about local opposition to the company’s efforts to find and exploit SA’s oil and gas reserves.

“We consider the objections to these developments as apartheid and colonialism of a special type, masquerading as a great interest for environmental protection,” Mantashe told a media briefing.

Three days later, December 12, the Sunday Times reported that the ANC was broke and needed to find R200m before the end of 2021 to pay staff who at that point were owed three months’ wages.

By December 21, though, significant progress had been made. Two months’ wages were paid, and the rest of the money would be transferred to staff the following day, said party spokesperson Pule Mabe. He refused to say where the money had come from.

On Tuesday, we learnt that in the final quarter of 2021 the Batho Batho Trust gave R15m to the ANC. This emerged from declarations published by the Electoral Commission of SA under the Political Party Funding Act.

We know from a Sunday Times report in 2010 that the trust was set up to “receive dividends” for the ANC, and in 1992 it founded Thebe Investments as an ANC company. It still holds 46.8% of Thebe.

Thebe made its first investment in Shell in 2003, and in 2015 it took up a 28% stake in Shell Downstream SA, which combined SA’s marketing and refining businesses.

It wields enormous influence as Shell’s BEE partner. The chair of Thebe’s board is former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene.

Joining the dots from the information above is about as difficult as scoring 30% to pass matric. The obvious conclusion will be denied by the likes of Mabe and Mantashe, but only their fellow travellers in the black, green and gold parallel universe are likely to swallow the Kool-Aid.

Batho Batho Trust’s donation of R15m, by the way, is the maximum a party can receive in a single year from a single donor under the party funding act implemented less than a year ago. A report last month to the ANC national working committee (NWC) proposed that the limit be raised as high as R100m or scrapped.

It’s difficult to see the ANC’s financial stake in the commercial success of organisations such as Batho Batho, Thebe and Chancellor House Holdings as anything other than a direct conflict between the interests of the country and those of the party.

The state capture commission reports released so far painted an ugly picture of the ANC lining its pockets with kickbacks, and the party’s NWC appointed policy chief Jeff Radebe to lead a task team examining the commission’s recommendations about where the ANC went wrong.

In a statement last month, the NWC said: “The ANC will support government in effecting the measures required to eliminate conditions and conduct that enable state capture and systemic corruption.”

One of those “conditions” must surely be the ANC’s financial stake in the commercial success of organisations such as Batho Batho, Thebe and Chancellor House Holdings.

It’s difficult to see this as anything other than a direct conflict between the interests of the country and those of the party, and acting chief justice Raymond Zondo’s findings so far have made the disastrous consequences of such a conflict clear.

Radebe would do well to reconsider the ANC funding model, set up in good faith and with good intentions by the likes of Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in the early 1990s.

It’s become a voracious monster that is devouring the party and the country. South Africans need to be put out of the misery it continues to inflict.