For two days this week, we listened to President Cyril Ramaphosa giving testimony at the state capture commission.
A much-anticipated affair; his appearance as the leader of the ANC was a significant moment in history. In part it demonstrated the health of our democracy, which compels a sitting president to appear before a judicial commission to account for the decisions of his party and their impact on government and the nation at large.
This is a concept we must never take for granted but must jealously guard as an important feature of our constitutional order.
Ramaphosa’s appearance was also an opportunity for the nation to hear how his party explains its conduct during a period in which the capture of state institutions took place. Perhaps one of the most important admissions he made was that it effectively took six years for the party to acknowledge the phenomenon that is state capture and to back efforts to investigate it.
In that time, billions of rands were lost through various nefarious deals, state-owned enterprises were almost bankrupted and our law enforcement had been so compromised that they were rendered the weakest they had been in the democratic era.
As far as Ramaphosa’s testimony goes, his admission only went as far as shedding some light on the mood of contestation in the party at the time but failed to adequately account for specific organisational failures that contributed to the rot.
Without such transparency and accountability, we are none the wiser about the true nature of the political machinations that promoted systemic corruption in our country. It was therefore disingenuous of the president to expect us to take him at his word that such wide-scale destruction can never happen again.
Fair enough, we have seen various interventions inasfar as legally pursuing those who were involved in state capture. But the question is in the absence of credible and sustainable political reforms in the party, how can we clamp down on systemic capturing of state institutions over which it presides?
Perhaps the lessons lie in our recent past. When leaders continued to run amok, when our politics failed us and the integrity of our institutions eroded, it was brave and independent voices, be it whistleblowers, civil society, the media and the judiciary that held the last line of defence.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of the president's testimony is that the strength of our democracy ultimately lies in how much we as ordinary people are prepared to work to defend it.
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