Parliament’s joint committee on ethics and members’ interests on Monday found EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu, also a chief whip of his party, guilty of failing to disclose three payments worth a total R180,000 from his brother.
Shivambu’s brother Brian had received almost R300,000 from the defunct Venda Business Society (VBS) mutual bank. The committee looked into claims that EFF leader Julius Malema possibly benefited from the looting of VBS — which led to its collapse — but found no evidence to this effect. The bank served mostly poor people in the far north of the country. Many of them were pensioners whose lives changed for the worse because of the bank’s collapse — at a time when they were too old to earn a living.
It is through this prism that revelations of wrongdoing against anyone implicated in the saga must be viewed. If indeed Shivambu received funds from pensioners — even if it’s just R100 — he must be pursued with all the might the state can muster. His sanction — forfeiting nine days' pay — for not declaring income from his brother is a slap on the wrist.
Shivambu and the EFF have announced that this matter will be taken on review in court. They contend that Shivambu did not directly, that being the operative word, receive money from VBS. This is correct. But it is also not the finding of the committee. The latter, to be clear, found that Shivambu received funds from his brother who, himself, is a beneficiary of VBS. In other words, Shivambu is an indirect beneficiary of the VBS saga.
Shivambu is within his rights to take the matter to the courts. We have confidence that the courts will do a synthesis of the issues, and if Shivambu has a case to answer, the courts will make this finding in clearer terms than parliament has.
Certainly, it doesn’t necessarily follow that simply receiving funds from someone who has received a dodgy tender, for example, means you partook in their shenanigans. It raises a lot of questions if the funder has no other sources of income but the dodgy tender. This is implied in the Shivambu brothers’ case. That said, the corollary isn’t always true. Put differently, even the super-rich with diverse income streams could be used to launder, as it were, funds from dodgy sources.
Parliament is now saying Shivambu senior had a duty to parliament to, at the very least, declare his additional income. Whether the funds were fraudulently sent to him is for the police and other investigators to establish. What is factual, parliament tells us, is that specific amounts flowed from Brian Shivambu to Floyd Shivambu, who had a duty to inform parliament but failed to. To the extent that this is true — and will withstand the impending legal challenge — it is shameful. The EFF, which positions itself as a champion of the poor, the very victims of the VBS saga, will find it difficult to appeal to voters with such a deputy president.
In this election season, what the effusive rebuttal from the EFF attempts to do is force us to suspend judgment of its deputy president until after the polls or, in their language, until after the courts have pronounced on the matter. It’s called kicking for touch. It may take a while to get the poor pensioners of the far north justice, but all people who benefited from the collapse of the bank should be pursued, however long it takes.
