At first glance, a road in Durban doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with a bridge in Italy, but there are parallels that we’d do well to heed as we begin to contemplate the end of ANC misrule and the beginning of some sort of reconstruction.
On Thursday, Patricia de Lille reported the findings of an internal audit into the rebuilding of state-owned properties in KwaZulu-Natal damaged or destroyed in April’s flood, strongly hinting that this reconstruction is going as well as you’d expect from the people who brought us the Beitbridge border fence.
While the minister of public works didn’t explicitly say that the process is turning into the orgy of corruption and dysfunction that characterises everything the ANC touches, she did speak as angrily as a cabinet minister can while condemning the fruits of ANC rule, saying that “these initial results are extremely worrying” and that she wanted to find out “which officials need to face consequences where wrongdoing is confirmed”.
Coming just a month after former public protector Thuli Madonsela spoke about SA’s burgeoning “gangster culture” — essentially a refusal by the state to go after corrupt “family” — and a week after News24 reported on the relentless spread of “construction mafias” into all provinces, De Lille’s concerns were clear.
When I read stories like this, I automatically soothe myself by telling myself that this sort of thing will stop once the ANC is voted out of power.
Of course, this is pure denial, not least because I’m ignoring the very real possibility that our next government could be an ANC-EFF coalition and that by 2030 we might be remembering the early 2020s as a political and economic golden age.
I’m also ignoring another grim fact, which is that once mafias take hold, they are fantastically difficult to dislodge.
a`54Finally, pocket the balance, and wait for the bridge to start falling apart, which, thanks to you, will happen sooner rather than later, at which point your bought politician will give you another tender to fix the bridge again.
Part of the reason for this is how quickly they transform themselves into legitimate-looking organisations. News24 reports, for example, that SA’s mafiosos are already establishing “business forums” to give themselves an air of legitimacy. Which brings me back to Italy.
In 2018, when a 200m stretch of a motorway bridge in Genoa collapsed and killed 43 people, Italian politicians were quick to blame the mafia.
It was an easy explanation for a national tragedy. Decades ago, the Cosa Nostra infiltrated the country’s construction industry in more or less the same way that our local mobsters are doing it now. Once they’d shot off enough kneecaps and torched enough construction sites, however, the tenders started winning themselves, at which point they started profiting off a vastly lucrative system which I’m sure we’re already seeing in SA.
First, you win a tender to repair a bridge. As I say, this has already been taken care of, thanks to your reputation, your enforcer’s blowtorch, and/or the local politicians you’ve bought.
Next, you buy the cheapest materials you can source, cut every corner you can and hire labourers you can extort into doing the job more or less for free.
Finally, pocket the balance, and wait for the bridge to start falling apart, which, thanks to you, will happen sooner rather than later, at which point your bought politician will give you another tender to fix the bridge again. And so on and so on.
Here in SA, I’m not sure we’ve quite understood the cynicism of this process. I think we still tend to believe tenderpreneurs or corrupt cadres are trying to score one-off jackpots. But if we’re going to understand what we’re seeing in the future, we need to be very clear about one thing: the point of corrupt construction tenders isn’t to be paid for a job you can’t do. It’s to be paid over and over again for a job you deliberately don’t do.
Where things get rather depressing, however, is that the mafia wasn’t responsible for the Genoa collapse in 2018: subsequent investigations found no evidence of mob involvement or the use of substandard materials.
It’s depressing because it offers a glimpse of our potential future, in which construction mafias are so ubiquitous, and their crimes so common, that they are automatically the prime suspects when a building or a bridge collapses.
Voting out the ANC will be a start; but the mafia is already entrenched, laundering its money and its reputation, and systematically undermining the foundations of the future.
We have a terribly long way to go.
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