South Africans and Argentines fought corruption, without success – 05/21/2023 – Marcus Melo

Events in Brazil remind me of the fate of Andrew Feinstein, protagonist of the fight against corruption in South Africa, and of the Arms Deal Scandal. The case involved the ANC, the governing party of post-apartheid South Africa.

A young star of the party and member of Parliament, Feinstein was a member of the Public Accounts Commission, which was responsible for appointing the incumbent and supervising the Auditor General, the highest external control body.

The chairmanship of the commission rested, as in the United Kingdom, with the opposition parties; in this case, the Inkhata Freedom Party, a party from the province of Kwazulu Natal. Professor of public finance, Gavin Woods, from the University of Stellenbosch, native and raised in the province, as he explained to me in an interview, took the post.

Feinstein reported that one fine day he received in his mailbox an audit piece about one of the bids for the purchase of fighter jets and submarines (worth US$ 5 billion) and that it pointed out irregularities. Feinstein and the eminent professor—whose air of gravity was accentuated by his amputated leg and severely handicapped arm—launched investigations, finding $90 million diverted to the ANC.

The installed political tsunami culminated in the recall by the ANC of President Thabo Mbeki (the president is elected by Parliament, where the ANC has had about 70% of the seats).

A party bigwig, Jacob Zuma, replaced him. But the situation had to get much worse to get better. Zuma went under in another $6 billion scandal (the “Gupta Family”). The party also removed Feinstein from the commission and excluded him from the ANC’s electoral lists.

I had the opportunity to interview him at the Johannesburg airport, when he was returning to England, where he had gone into self-exile. “All doors are closed to me in South Africa,” he said. At the time, the case contrasted with the trial of the monthly allowance, which had just concluded. The outcome of scandals in Argentina, where I was also doing research at the time, reinforced my relative optimism about Brazil.

In that country, Menem had extinguished the Court of Auditors, which threatened him, replacing it with the Auditor General model. The appointment by the opposition (in this case the UCR) of the General Auditor seemed, in theory, promising. It was a fiasco. Leandro Despouy, appointed by the UCR to the post during Cristina Kirchner’s government, confided to me: “We request information from federal agencies, and they ignore us. Nothing comes of it.”

My optimism was based on the realization that there was nothing like the hegemonic controls of the ANC and Peronism in our multi-party system. But the enemies of the fight against corruption exercise control in other ways.

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