I FIRST saw the phrase “for my friends, everything; for my enemies the law” with reference to the modus operandi of Russia’s pitiless president, Vladimir Putin.
If you read accounts of the kleptocracy in the Kremlin and the ruthless manner in which Putin’s diktat is enforced, it seems an understatement.
The recently published book Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice, by Bill Browder, provides a first-hand, terrifying read.
It is a baleful reminder of what happened to one businessman. Browder headed Hermitage Capital, the largest foreign private equity investor in the post-communist state, when he crossed Putin’s line and attempted to recover assets stolen by the president’s cronies. His lawyer was murdered by Russian security men and Browder’s determination to internationalise this human rights monstrosity is a morality tale of note.
But in recent discussion with a South American friend, I was put to rights on the source of the famous quote on impunity for the president’s friends and legal sanction for his foes. It was apparently first uttered by the Brazilian president Getulio Vargas.
He still holds two records, neither of them reassuring: he remains the longest serving civilian ruler of the Latin American giant (1930-45; 1950-54). His first and longest bout was as a dictator and his second iteration, as a democratic president who committed suicide.
Whatever the provenance of the quote, it is a great shorthand explanation for how the law can be manipulated on two fronts: either as an instrument for use against political and economic enemies; or allowing the privileged to exempt themselves from the legal consequences of their criminal acts. In a word: impunity.
The Argentinian political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell once recounted with some feeling what he labelled “an old Latin American tradition”. He wrote how a “shady businessman” said in Argentina “to be powerful means having legal impunity”.
O’Donnell explains that the person was simply expressing a “widespread feeling that to follow the law voluntarily is something only morons do”.
Indeed, in the inverted universe of two sets of laws — one for the favoured insiders and the other for the rest — “to be subject to the law is not to be the carrier of enforceable rights, but rather a sure sign of social weakness”.
Back here in today’s SA, the riveting Sunday Times exposé proves that our defence minister, on O’Donnell’s triaging, is certainly neither a moron nor a weakling. The woman who is the political head of our nation’s defences, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, defiantly declared that she provided passage in a state aircraft for a fugitive from Burundi who used forged papers, apparently provided by the minister’s sister, to enter SA illegally. But far from cowed by the exposé, the minister declared that in order to give the apparently abused fugitive “education and love” she would break the law again, if necessary.
So, next time you are charged with an offence, try her explanation as a novel defence. Of course, to those outside the charmed local circle of state power it will prove unavailing. It is interesting nonetheless to list the serial impunity and self-absolution that members of President Jacob Zuma’s Cabinet provide for themselves and their senior apparatchiks, and then wonder about the state of anarchy and lawlessness against which Zuma rails.
He correctly denounced the destruction of schools in Vuwani and auditoriums at universities and elsewhere. But if those at the centre of power can flout the law, as Zuma’s Cabinet did when ignoring a court order to detain Sudanese tyrant Omar al-Bashir last year, why should the poor and destitute on the periphery of the country bother to listen to such admonitions from a tainted source?
Back to our truculent and law-breaking minister of defence: readers might recall the antics last year of her splendidly defiant Cabinet colleague, Malusi Gigaba.
He decided — in defiance of the entire tourism industry and in the face of basic common sense — to introduce the most stringent visa regime for children in the known world. Only when tourism numbers dropped precipitously, precisely for the reasons of which he was warned before the regulations were introduced, did he amend some of them. But his righteous indignation — to protect children against the evils of trafficking — remained unamended in provisions still in place.
It is noteworthy that the “victim of abuse” for whom Mapisa-Nqakula diverted an official aircraft, is in fact a legal minor aged 20. Join these dots if you can.
Far less dotty, and much more serious for the economic wellbeing of the entire country, is the war on all fronts being waged against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan. The on-off-perhaps-on-again threats from state agencies to arrest him is all of a piece with the maxim “for my enemies, the law”. It is well chronicled that the three-finance-ministers-in-four-days fiasco engineered by Zuma in December, apparently at the behest of his Gupta friends, led the president reluctantly to reinstate Gordhan. It is equally clear that both the financial markets and Zuma himself are in a state of exquisite equipoise of mutual contempt.
Zuma hates the fact that market forces forced him to retract his appointment of Des van Rooyen. That there was some energetic pressure from ANC heavyweights motivated either by the national interest or personal fear of a collapsed currency and economy, no doubt aggravated Zuma’s own sense of impunity. Now the nation and its economic prospects are imperilled by the latest, ever-changing manoeuvres of the Hawks, headed by a person who the courts have declared to be a liar.
But on the friends side of the equation, it appears as though there is no favour too great and no pressure too severe that will not be applied in furtherance of the interests of the Guptas. The fact that a full Cabinet meeting — absent the finance minister, notably — declared that the commercial interests of the Guptas needed to be prosecuted against the banks who had decided to close their accounts.
The extraordinary explanation for this was provided by their family fixer, who also doubles as the minister of mineral resources; Mosebenzi Zwane. He declared it was all about saving the jobs of the Gupta employees in Oakbay Investments.
There are about 4,000 such employees. But in the same week as he provided this explanation, Statistics SA released record-breaking unemployment figures that dwarf the Gupta losses: 5.7-million people in the country are unemployed, nearly 1.3-million more than when Zuma entered office in 2009. Continuing to play fast and loose with the rule of law and acting heedlessly in defiance of sensible economics, as Team Zuma is doing with such devastation, will see this number surge.
I recently returned to Argentina, where Guillermo O’Donnell cut his academic teeth, and witnessed first-hand the devastation caused by populist politics and reckless economics and impunity for the favoured, as practiced by the Peronist former president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Sadly, O’Donnell died in 2011, when Kirchner was re-elected. But last December, her political party was finally defeated and a new, law-abiding president and economic moderate Mauricio Marci was elected.
However, perhaps O’Donnell read, before he died, The Economist description of Kirchner’s misrule and bending of state institutions to favour the president’s cronies. It read “Capitalism for my friends, socialism for my enemies”. It is a pretty handy definition for SA right now as well.
• Leon is a former leader of the opposition.
