Lessons from Zondo commission
As the judicial commission of inquiry into allegations of ‘state capture’ proceed over the next few months, there may be crucial lessons for all South Africans to learn. Much of what has been revealed, and undeniably much of what will still be revealed, will give all of us insight into the mistakes of the immediate past. What we do with this information will shape the immediate future.
Those of us who are in business may find it tempting to point at the corporations and concerns implicated in the testimony. Angelo Agrizzi’s testimony may lead many captains of industry and entrepreneurs to see in him the pariah they wish never to be. The names of those he accuses of malfeasance may be dropped off lists of people to pursue future business with, at least in the public eye. But that is not nearly enough.
Something more substantial must be taken from the testimony, in how we conduct ourselves as citizens of democratic South Africa, both as individuals as well as corporations. The corporations and business people implicated in the testimony various witnesses have given before Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo have so far treated their implication as an issue of reputational damage. Their responses have been to explain and explain away how they came to be named, or to remain silent, hoping it will all go away. Some have even gone before the DCJ to give their version of events in order to set the record straight, only to have the public accuse them of trying to spin.
Nearly twenty years ago Stephen Fry starred in Absolute Power, a British television series satirising the public relations industry. Fry starred as one of two senior partners in Prentiss McCabe, a firm which prided itself on rehabilitating the reputations of (mostly fictional) disgraced celebrities and politicians. Somewhere in the second series the firm even competes with Bell Pottinger to rehabilitate the reputation of the Bin Laden family. In contemporary South Africa we have seen how reputation management has often been an issue of rehabilitating a name brought into disrepute, either because of allegations or actual wrong-doing.
Political parties and the politicians who are the core actors in those organisations have given and continue to give an increasingly information hungry public and public relations managers enough to feast on. But perhaps the best way to manage a reputation is to avoid being implicated in shaming events. To take the advice of the fictional Prentiss McCabe team, there are three strategies to pursue: deny everything, admit everything, or do nothing wrong in the first place.
In business the last option – do nothing wrong in the first place – is obviously the best option from a reputation management perspective. If you weren’t involved, you don’t have to deny anything as you have the proof of such distance, and therefore can freely admit to everything. But sometimes profit demands otherwise. Or poor judgement leads to compromises. However, the question which still confronts all business people with decision making power is what they had done to ensure the reputation of the firm and its officers remains intact.
This is not about covering or masking or explaining away misconduct. This is about preventing bad conduct. Think of the juniors in the auditing firms implicated in the ‘VBS heist’. Where were the seniors looking out for their individual reputations, and perhaps more crucially, for the reputations of the multinational corporations they worked for? If a firm’s job is to guarantee the good conduct of other firms, it cannot itself be implicated in (or worse) misconduct itself. And yet, the record shows how far down the rabbit hole we have gone in that sector.
In the same example – the ‘VBS heist’ – it is the conduct of the municipal treasurer of a Limpopo municipality which stands out. She refused to compromise her own ethics, stuck to her guns on what her job required her to do, and with some great personal cost to her personal reputation (she was labelled a racist by those who saw her as obstructionist, rather than ethical), refused to simply go along. She chose to do nothing wrong, rather than to have to deny everything – as several politicians and business people have done, in the face of mounting evidence and dissembling co-conspirators – or having to admit everything – which Mr Agrizzi has been the first to do, complete with video footage.
The lesson which we must learn from the stories being told at the Zondo Commission is to become the sort of people who do nothing wrong in the first place, and in the second place, to be vigilant about preventing wrong-doing by others, both in business and in everyday life. We ought to take courage from the examples of those who stood up against the bullying, including the project managers who were fired from the Nkandla upgrades when they questioned scope creep. In business reputation is important, and once damaged, it can take more resources to recover than is available in economically constrained times. Also, it can become the legacy we leave our children, to have lived in a country where wrongdoing was the exception rather than the rule.