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\n\u201cTo have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.\u201d <\/p>\n
MALCOM X<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
BBBEE (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment)<\/a> was designed by the South African government to redress racial imbalances in the economy. But the policy has been hijacked and repurposed by individuals and factions within the ruling party for the purpose of corruption and self-enrichment, notably during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
The government\u2019s cadre-based BBBEE narrative has been roped in to restructure the economy amid the Covid-pandemic, so as to perpetuate an economic crime by the state. This phenomenon is well explained by the Canadian social and political activist Naomi Klein\u2019s notion of disaster capitalism<\/a>, read alongside Reiman\u2019s \u201cpyrrhic defeat theory\u2019<\/a>\u201d, which I probe in the context of a criminological perspective.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Reiman, a conflict criminologist based in the US, contends that the criminal justice system in capitalist states, such as South Africa, demonises the poor as criminogenic in order to deflect the crimes of the rich, thereby legitimising the unjust and unequal distribution of income and wealth that underpins that social order.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BBBEE was repurposed as an ideological vehicle to fulfil an unstated nefarious purpose, namely self-enrichment, under the banner of so-called black economic empowerment. Said in another way, the narrative to which I refer is built around the \u201cfictitious\u201d idea of black economic empowerment but increasingly serves as a vehicle for fraudulent personal enrichment by politicians and well-connected tenderpreneurs.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Repurposed BBBEE is fictitious, because it only benefits a tiny group at the top, amid widespread unemployment, economic stagnation and poverty.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stanley Cohen<\/a>, a world expert on crimes committed by the state, suggests that crimes typically committed by the rich and powerful are not only rarely prosecuted but are not even classified as \u201ccrimes\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Green criminology<\/a>, a branch of critical criminology, highlights the government\u2019s complicity in environmental crimes, especially its patchy record on global warming.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Consider how easily and surreptitiously the government can repurpose its response to a pandemic disaster for personal gain.<\/p>\n
In a recently published paper<\/a>, I argue that the South African government\u2019s BBBEE agenda has, in most cases, been hijacked by at least a faction within the ruling party as a pretext for the large-scale looting of the public purse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I demonstrate how vested interests in the government used the Covid\u201119 pandemic as a form of disaster capitalism (a term coined by Klein) to divert the lion\u2019s share of funding for crucial PPE (personal protective equipment) procurement, for personal gain.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Klein explains the idea of disaster capitalism in the following riveting terms: \u201cOnce a crisis has struck \u2026 it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the \u2018tyranny of the status quo\u2019.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that while Friedman\u2019s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision.<\/p>\n
Klein\u2019s highlighting of authoritarianism might be the missing link between the South African government\u2019s hard lockdown and the looting of the public purse with such impunity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One example of this is the tendency of governments around the world to turn the fight against crime into an exercise for authoritarian control over society, as the well-known Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie<\/a> warned in his book Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags Western Style<\/em><\/a> (2017).\u00a0<\/p>\n
By analogy, I suggest that disasters such as Covid-19 have provided a similar opportunity for government, certainly in South Africa, to perpetuate self-enrichment schemes under the guise of a false-flag operation such as BBBEE.<\/p>\n
Despite President Cyril Rama-phosa\u2019s influential anti-corruption election ticket, there is no guarantee that he would survive politically, considerably compounded by the robbery at his Phala Phala game farm.\u00a0<\/p>\n