MAKHUDU SEFARA | Complacency in democracy allows the rise of untouchables across public institutions

There are things we know are important but take for granted until our reality is shaken or assumptions put to a test.

While the discovery this week that those fighting malfeasance could think of the Madlanga commission as a “s***show” and even encourage others to flee from it will amuse and shock at the same time, the truth is that stability and normalcy make us complacent. We forget that life is sometimes a series of sobering shocks because nothing is as it seems.

Let’s pivot towards sport to illustrate the point. Gianni Infantino, the Fifa president, has become a latter-day example of how absolute power corrupts. His idea of creating a subsidiary, Fifa Forward Enterprise, and selling a $4.2bn stake in it to private investors, has fortunately proved abortive. He had argued that this was in the interest of football. Fifa’s 211 member associations would receive a one-off $20m bonanza. Uefa, the Union of European Football Associations, was the first to baulk at the idea, threatening a boycott of all Fifa tournaments. The Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football rejected the proposal, as did the Asian Football Confederation. Fifa had no option but to scrap the whole idea.

What this demonstrates is that concentrated institutional authority can, and often does, lead to unchecked decision-making and a flagrant disregard for collective governance. How can the fate of Fifa’s crown jewels be negotiated behind closed doors by one individual? The acknowledgement by Fifa COO Kevin Lamour that staff members were “deceived” talks to a worrying lack of transparency within the organisation. The $20m bonanza to associations shows reliance on money to build buy-in and loyalty.

It was Infantino’s belief in his own untouchability, his illusion of invincibility, that led him down this path. Even if he survives, his warped idea has not.

The truth is there are many Infantinos, many untouchables, roaming among us. They behave as though they don’t breathe the same oxygen as the rest of us. They hide behind institutional successes. Yet deep inside they know they should themselves be put under the microscope.

The truth is there are many Infantinos, many untouchables, roaming among us. They behave as though they don’t breathe the same oxygen as the rest of us

Take the British post office scandal, which unfolded over nearly two decades, in which powerful executives refused to accept that their payment system, Horizon, could be malfunctioning. More than 700 innocent post office staff, including branch managers, were prosecuted or fired on suspicion of financial wrongdoing. It has been called the greatest miscarriage of justice in modern British history.

In Nigeria, an entire fictitious government body — the Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council – was created and budgeted for. It siphoned off $950,000 before the deception, made possible through lack of checks and balances, was uncovered.

Here at home, it takes balls of steel to plan and execute the criminalisation of crime intelligence boss Dumisani Khumalo and national police commissioner Fannie Masemola. I write a related but different piece here about my own run-ins with the Special Investigations Unit. If even such senior police generals, with all the resources at their disposal, are not immune to this kind of action, what hope do the rest of us have?

What happened to Khumalo and Masemola was driven by an official who perhaps never imagined they would one day be trusted with the kind of power they now exercise on a daily basis. They may have been on the hunt for someone prominent, someone whose scalp would help them gain kudos.

When they realise that there are no checks and balances, they begin to feel like gods. The more they violate other people’s rights without facing consequences, the more untouchable they become.

Yet, the idea of checks and balances is as old as time. It is well known but taken for granted until things go wrong. It’s taken for granted because when checks are in place, catastrophies are avoided and normalcy becomes the default, natural state. The sense of order creates the illusion that we can lower our guard.

We view democracy as an inheritance we will always have and forget that tyranny could take many shapes. We start believing that empowerment laws are a nice to have rather than a historical imperative that should remain our lodestar in correcting the wrongs of the past.

Sometimes those with power simply appoint people who share their language, gender or skin colour and term it preference. It’s not. It’s a blind spot. Other times, the powerful stack the boards of such entities as the Public Investment Corp with loyalists because they want favourable, quicker decisions about matters in which they are involved. They forget that the very thing that is convenient may become their undoing. They forget value in diversity.

But even when there is diversity in parliament, MPs lazily just mimic the real Madlanga commission lawyers by parroting phrases such as “I put it to you” instead of doing the real, grinding work democracy requires.

Parliament has egg on its face because its ad hoc committee on police corruption must this week circle back to Andrea Johnson, who lied to it and played it because MPs lowered their guards when we, the people they should be diligently representing, trusted them to question her without fear or favour.

The point is all of them, as MPs, have been played and the people are poorer for it. Our only saving grace is the Madlanga commission. But it, too, must guard against the ever-present temptation to categorise people as heroes or villains; vigilance must be the commissioners’ watchword if they are to surface facts that may be even more shocking than what we have already learnt. Johnson should not shock us; we must ask ourselves how many versions of her remain entrusted with public power.