The evil coalition of the elite captured in Lehohla’s judgement is one where these elites cling together like a banana bunch and ripen in the dark away from public scrutiny.
The era of indifference and the evil project of coalition of the elite is running on steroids, yet running out of rope.
Four significant summits in which I participated have taken place in South Africa on this subject in the past 30 days. They highlight the urgency and the importance of human agency to arrest the lived negative and deplorable consequences of indifference of the evil coalition of the elite in South Africa.
There are many examples that assist to foreground how human agency is the single most important tool to address and resolve an evil coalition. These evil accords span small and big geographies. They can be traced on a large and small geographic scale. They cover different economic sectors. What is common amongst them is of course concealment.
The conduct of such a coalition was best defined in a groundbreaking case two decades to date by the Chief Justice of Lesotho Mahapela Lehohla, who presided over the case of Acres of Canada.
In the Canadian Business Journal by Matthew McClearn of September 2003, he opens with an enthusing journalistic outlook and writes, “Many Canadians cannot point to Lesotho on a map. Some have never heard of it. In the cruel calculus of world politics, business, trade and finance, it is almost completely irrelevant.
“And yet, this tiny nation landlocked by South Africa must loom large on the minds of executives at Acres International Ltd, an engineering consulting firm based in Oakville, Ontario. Its legal representatives are now in the capital, Maseru, for what could be the endgame of the most important battle in the company's 79-year history.”
These evil coalitions play in different spaces big and small.
One such that set the path of South Africa’s development is the evil coalition of gold and maize that created the Union in 1910. The sworn enemies who ultimately fought an Anglo-Boer War came to sign an evil peace accord at the centre of which was a maize and gold accord.
The sacrificial lamb of this accord of the elite was the blacks through different state configurations, the epitome of which was apartheid.
At a global scale and constantly re-emerging and violently so, is the Zionist coalition that has played injustice for eight decades against the Palestinians. It is so determined that it has mobilised the Western countries on a path of ill-conceived form of morality to plunge the world into a polycrisis in their quest to exterminate Palestinians.
Ironically, what they are doing to Palestinians is what the world declared as genocide against the Jews in the Second World War.
The Jews have relentlessly pursued justice at the Criminal Court of Justice against the Second World War genocide. To date they are dealing with the last of these perpetrators who are now almost centenarians. The monkey cannot identify itself in the mirror. This is what is evil about these coalitions of the elite.
Like in the case of Acres in Lesotho, the coalition of maize and gold played itself in small parts of South Africa, some of which are unknown in the Gazetteers of Names in South Africa.
While the Marikana massacre left democratic South Africa ashamed and hypocritically a decade later justice has not been served, somewhere a hundred kilometres from Marikana, is Thabazimbi, which was and still is a mainstay of iron ore for South Africa.
Here a coalition of a different type of elites emerged almost over eight decades ago. The substrate was not of iron ore and cattle, but it was one of migrant labourers and their host.
The migrants from the Eastern Cape worked on the Thabazimbi mines of the then Northern Transvaal and present-day North-West Province. Their hosts were the friendly Batswana. The migrants as we all know were male and they soon found comfort of matters of the heart in their friendly Batswana hosts.
Traditionally, working on the mines represented rights of passage to forming a family. The expectation was that this will be with the labour sending maidens. But alas not only were the maidens ignored, but families that already existed were broken by the soft hearts of the Batswana maidens that tamed the Xhosa men. The Xhosa women would have none of it. They moved in numbers to Thabazimbi in Mokgalwaneng and Mantserre to establish themselves.
In the midst of all this a village called Sefikile was born. Sefikile means we have arrived. The Xhosa women came to claim their men from the Batswana women. Not only did they come to claim them but by establishing a village they also sent a clear message that they are not going back. “Sefikile hase buye” - we have arrived, and we are not going back, the Xhosa women said as they laid claim by establishing a village and claiming what is theirs.
The conferences and summits I attended are moving in that direction of the Sefikile Claims. The lamentations are about how the elite plot took hold and contaminated the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the imperatives embraced in the supreme law, the Constitution of our land.
In all these convening sessions the reclamation of the peoples’ power from the evil coalition of the elite is called for. At the Fourth Drakensberg Inclusive Growth Forum the former deputy minister of finance, Mcebisi Jonas, said we need a reset that disrupts this elite coalition.
Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana pointed to the many challenges which included how much corruption continues to eat at the heart of the nation. Earlier in the month of October, The Interfaith Forum of South Africa came to the same conclusion that the evil elite coalition has to be brought to an end.
In his judgement of Acres of Canada of September 2003, Chief Justice Lehohla with pinpoint precision defined how the evil coalition functions – like banana bunches that ripen in the dark – the evil coalition of corruption ripens in the dark.
While this seminal judgement, probably in the words of the chief justice, said, “This is the first time a First World company (operating) in the Third World has been convicted of bribing a public official. The amount is staggering...and great harm has been done to Lesotho.”
The conduct of latter-day successive governments in Lesotho seems not to have learnt much. South Africa is in the same league as the case of the French Arms Deal resumes and corruption as revealed by the Zondo Commission goes far beyond the Arms Deal and Gupta link.
The evil coalition of the elite captured in Lehohla’s judgement is one where these elites cling together like a banana bunch and ripen in the dark away from public scrutiny.
It is time to be like the Xhosa women who marched to the vicinity of Thabazimbi and not only reclaimed their men from the Tswana women, but settled there and coexisted peacefully with them. There is a lot to learn from Sefikile.
Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.
BUSINESS REPORT