What does Democracy mean? Part 1

The ideal for which Democracy stands is that each person in a State has an effective say in the Government which rules him or her, that he or she has a voice in the amount of taxes paid, and how these taxes are spent or invested, that the Government is responsible to the people.

The reality of “Democracy” is quite different.  The race to be elected is not spurred by a burning desire to apply one’s skills, abilities and intelligence to the ultimate ‘good of the people’, but rather a desire to join the gravy train.  Government provides an almost unparalleled income-generating opportunity.  Once the race is ‘won’ and the contestant ‘comes to power’ (both very revealing phrases), the process begins, of rewarding those who have supported the campaign, as well as those who are expected to have an influence in the next campaign, of building a ‘power base’, and of milking the Government funds for personal benefit.  The proportions of effort, and therefore of the flow of money and benefits from Government sources to each of these depends to a large extent on the country in which the candidate finds himself, on the sophistication of the electorate, on the efficiency and independence of the monitoring institutions, and on the degree of security felt by the politician.

First come the personal benefits – the Mercedes, Porsche, BMW or Range Rover, the salary and expense account, and similar matters.  Once this is in the process of being attended to, the politician sets about appointing his personal staff, including secretaries, personal assistants and bodyguards (is it not strange that every politician, who claims to be appointed by the people and to represent the people, has such a fear of the people that an entourage of bodyguards is considered essential, presumably to protect the ‘valuable’ person of the politician from the people?  Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister of Britain during the Second World War, needed only one bodyguard!). The security staff of the President of South Africa numbers more than seven thousand!  It is an established tradition in Third World countries, such as South Africa, that the appointment of a person to a senior post brings with it the opportunity to appoint numerous others in more junior positions, each one of them paying a proportion of his or her inflated salary to the senior person in the chain, and/or repaying that person by means of support and silence in acts which would not receive the approval of the electorate.  In this way, the benefits of Government service to the incumbents of managerial positions are inflated well beyond the relative average salary, while the capabilities of the persons actually doing the work are well below the requirement, with the consequence that the standard of performance of Government is generally below that in the private sector.  It is certainly no coincidence that the Eastern Cape Provincial Government in South Africa employed some 30 000 persons who showed up at their offices only once each month, to collect their paycheques.  This was admitted by the Premier of the Province, who stated in 1996 that the situation needed correction.  When a Management Consultancy offered to undertake an investigation at no charge to enumerate the workers and non-workers on the payroll, the offer was summarily declined!  The Premier obviously did not want this information to go on record!  A conversation with a senior person in Government in 2009 indicated that this situation had not yet been corrected. 

When the politician has had the opportunity to strengthen his connections in the power hierarchy of government, the next phase begins.  This is the granting of lucrative contracts to favoured persons, either as a reward for support given or to be given, or, more usually, as a simple business transaction, with the politician, his family, close friends or Party associates taking a substantial payment from the proceeds of the contracts.  Very often this payment is brazenly demanded in advance.  A company which was negotiating a contract (in 1996) valued at R12 000 000 was told by a ‘representative’ of a Provincial Premier that the normal fee, payable in cash in advance, was 15%, or R1 800 000.  When the company manager expressed surprise at this demand, he was told ‘do not be concerned – the 15% includes the Premier and the Provincial Minister for Economic Affairs’!  In other words, the payoff was probably sufficient to satisfy most ‘claims’ for illicit payments.  In another case, a building contractor was granted a contract to construct some 9 000 RDP houses, at a cost of R15 000 each.  He immediately on-sold the contract at R9 000 each, pocketing the difference of R6 000 per house.  It is reasonable to assume that he did not retain the whole of this difference – 15% (apparently the going rate) of R15 000 is R2 250 per house, a total bribe of R20 250 000.  At that time, it was almost impossible to build a house of any quality for R15 000, a fact borne out recently by the Government announcement that it was planning to spend over R90 000 per house on necessary renovations to bring them to a habitable state.  While inflation has savaged the South African economy in the intervening years, one is constrained to ask who was picking up the payoff in this case.

The newly-elected Prime Minister of the Bahamas, some two months after his ‘victory’ over the previous incumbent, was asked by a telephone caller on a radio chat show why it was taking so long for him to award the profitable contracts to his supporters, who had gone out on a limb to support him during the election campaign.  In some embarrassment, he explained that Government contracts had to be awarded in open tender, and advised the caller to contact him privately to discuss the matter. The content of that private telephone call would certainly be of interest to scholars of the democratic system.

As time goes on, and the newly-elected representatives of the people become more secure in their positions, they start spreading their nets more widely.  They support ‘peoples’ liberation groups’ in their ‘struggle for freedom’ or send ‘peacekeeping forces’ to those war-torn areas that they had created.  This is usually not done as an altruistic venture, but for hard-headed business reasons.  Robert Mugabe, President of a destitute Zimbabwe, sent a ‘peacekeeping force’ to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in support of threatened DRC President Joseph Kabila, and received a payoff of 50% of the three richest diamond mines in the country, a benefit which he, magnanimously, shared with the Zimbabwean Minister of Defence, a key man in keeping Mugabe in power in Zimbabwe against the will of the people. The mines were summarily expropriated from the Belgian owner, who had built them up at his own cost, with no compensation being paid.

They enter into purchases of vast amounts of equipment, often for military purposes, but almost always with a personal benefit by way of bribe.  The sums involved are enormous – in one clear case, the President of an African country was paid a bribe of $20 000 000 by one of the major munitions suppliers.  This set the standard in that country, and subsequent attempts to place large contracts have involved values three to four times the size of the initial contract.

It does not need to be said that the money leaking from these transactions into the Swiss bank accounts of the people in power represents only a small percentage of the total amount of money wasted – a bribe of 15% of the value of a contract leaves 85% to be ‘value’.  The question is whether this 85% is real value to the purchaser, the people represented by the free-spending Government who, at the end, pay for it, either by payment of taxes or by non-delivery of the services and benefits for which the taxes were raised in the first place.  In most cases it would be reasonable to say that there was no real need for the goods purchased.  The Zimbabwean people did not benefit in any way from the sending of a ‘peacekeeping force’ to the DRC, the South African people did not need, or benefit from, the purchase of Navy vessels, fighter jets and helicopters, and the American people did not benefit from the Iraq war.  There are small groups of people who receive some benefit in each case – the Zimbabwean and American soldiers who might otherwise have been unemployed, the groups of military officers who saw their personal power bases, and prospects for added income, enhanced, and the politicians who arranged for some of the work to be done in their constituency, with a big payoff in terms of votes, but the total benefit is almost always much less than the total cost.  It would have been infinitely cheaper to have paid the bribes directly to the politicians involved and avoided the additional 85% occasioned by entering into the contracts.

The largest problems, of course, are that the public who are being fleeced in this way are not sufficiently interested to investigate each action by the Government, probably because the officials involved take care to ensure that they are never given the full and unadorned facts of the matter, and that the ‘watchdogs’ who are there to protect the public interest are not sufficiently vigilant or are part of the system.  The Police, a body designed to detect, correct and deter crime, consist of people who are dependent for their jobs on the very people they should be watching. Unfortunately, their appointment was based on the fact that their loyalty to those people would ensure that no meaningful investigation of corruption by their patrons would ever ensue. A telling proof of this is the statement to Parliament by the Minister of Police that the whole of the R246 000 000 spent by the State on the private residence of the President was justified as ‘security upgrades’. (one may be excused for wondering how a mud hut could need a quarter of a billion Rands in ‘security upgrades’!). Of course, the Party ensured that this outright lie, by the Minister and by the President was endorsed by the ANC MPs, who shouted down the members of the Opposition during the debate on this report, and so earned the disapprobation of the Constitutional Court for the dereliction of their Constitutional duty to hold the Executive to account. A similar situation occurred when President Mbeki avoided any Parliament debate on the honesty of the multi-billion Dollar Arms Procurement deal that made so many ANC members wealthy.

The public has little or no interest in actively participating in the monitoring of the people who serve them, probably because the obstacles and risks in doing so are so great.  Generally, Joe the Plumber does not feel that he has any ability to detect wrongdoing or to do anything to correct it, or, if he does actually act, he becomes a target for people who wield massive power.  The woman worker in the Department of Defense in the USA who detected some serious wrongdoing by officials in the Department, involving the giving of contracts with little control and contrary to regulations, found herself suspended shortly after she had brought the situation to the attention of senior officials.  Although the matter subsequently came to the attention of the TV media, it was a short-term wonder, with no result.  She was subsequently discharged from her job after many years of service. Perhaps the fact that the Deputy President of the country was a substantial shareholder in the benefitting company had something to do with the outcome. An investigation by the German Police into the bribing of a senior South Africa politician in the granting of a very large contract came to an end after the South African authorities (the Police, supported by the criminals in high Government positions) refused to provide a file required for the investigation. (One may deduce from this case that the German Police are honest and driven solely by law, while the South African Police acted entirely in the interests of the highly-placed Ministers and officials who profited from the crime.) An investigation by the British Police into alleged illegal payments to a Saudi Prince in the negotiations for a large aerospace contract came to a sudden end when the Saudi Government threatened to cut off negotiations in other contracts.  The Speaker of the English House of Commons went to great lengths to prevent the publication of wrongful or excessive expense claims by Parliamentarians.  When these expense claims were published, without the permission of the Government, the Speaker was forced to resign his position, but was immediately rewarded for his ‘sterling work’ by an elevation to the Peerage.  This latter is one of the few cases where the actions of a person with information received the support they deserved from the Press, even though the action of the ruling Party was not what any sane voter would have expected.  The list of known or strongly suspected wrongdoings by Politicians all over the world is very long, yet the list of corrections is extremely short.  Do not believe that these wrongful acts are a mere peccadillo.  Adolph Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks at an early stage if people of courage had stood up to stop him.  Unfortunately, those who were afraid to talk numbered in the tens of millions, including the ordinary German citizens, who recognised that his actions were not right, but were afraid to talk out in the face of perceived public support and a very real threat of retribution by Hitler’s thugs. That form of internal terrorism was supported by a British Prime Minister, who wanted ‘peace in our time’ at any cost. 

In order for evil to prevail, it is only necessary that good men do nothing.