JAUNDICED EYE

The state funeral — capitalised as a mark of respect — used to be a rare phenomenon. For most of recent history, it was the secular equivalent of sainthood. 

A State Funeral (SF) was a momentous event in a nation’s history. This was an honour awarded only after a rigorous interrogation as to whether their lives were of such merit that they deserved to be memorialised in this way.

In South Africa, however, it has since 1994 metastasised both in form and frequency to become almost meaningless. Just another bauble to be casually dispensed of by the African National Congress government to its comrades, their extended families and assorted hangers one whose contributions have, by any dispassionate accounting, been to the party, not to the nation. 

As is the case with so many of the traditions of parliamentary democracy in the English-speaking countries, the characteristics of the SF were shaped by the British. Initially reserved in its purest form for the titular head of state, it’s a long, elaborately scripted once-in-a-generation event, involving arcane ceremonies, as well as battalions of soldiers, batteries of artillery and, in the modern era, squadrons of aircraft. 

But not entirely for kings and queens only. In almost five centuries of SFs, about a dozen commoners cracked the nod for an SF from a grateful monarch. They included Isaac Newton, Nelson of Trafalgar, the Duke of Wellington, Edith Cavell, and with beautiful symbolism, following the devastation of World War I, the Unknown Soldier. 

In the post-World War II era until today, the only non-royal thus honoured has been Winston Churchill in 1965. It was a noteworthy enough occasion internationally to be a vivid memory of my childhood, courtesy of the British Pathé newsreels which, in that pre-television age, aired in South African cinemas prior to the main feature.

Since the SF is a ruinously expensive affair, it made sense to have a pared-down, less-elaborate honour for the monarch and parliament to bestow, that of the ceremonial funeral (CF). These are for senior royals and the occasional public figure, mostly statesmen and warriors. In the past 50 years, there have been only the revered Montgomery of Alamein and Maggie Thatcher, who although reviled as much as adored, was inarguably a seminal figure in British and global politics.

Between the formation of the Union in 1910 and the dawn of democracy in 1994, South African governments followed a narrower version of the British model, with just one category, that of the SF. Of the Prime Ministers who served under the British crown before South Africa became a republic in 1961, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts got SFs. After 1961, most of the Presidents had SFs, except for John Vorster (1983), PW Botha (2007) and FW de Klerk (2021), whose families declined the honour in favour of low-key burials.

Post-1994, the floodgates opened. First slowly, then fast. Even more than having a fleet of flashy new cars, designer threads, a mansion in a swish suburb, and private schools for the kids, having an SF has become the ultimate — and final — determinant of social status for the ANC elite.  And as befits a party and government notionally committed to an egalitarian society, the permutations of an SF, and hence the deceased’s ranking on the ANC roll of honour, are subtle and almost infinite. 

There is a meaty State, Official and Provincial Official Funeral Policy Manual, regularly updated, which outlines the options, with all the lavish detail that undertakers apply to the casket that the bereaved family might select. There are SFs, Official SFs. Special Official Funerals, Provincial Official SFs, and Special Provincial Official Funerals. Each kind of funeral comes in two categories, the first with military ceremonial honours, and the second with police ceremonial honours.

Broadly, SFs are for Presidents, former Presidents, Deputy- and Acting- Presidents (present and former). In other words, anyone who has stood in for any of our four Presidents and nine Deputy Presidents while they are abroad, which happens regularly, is entitled to an SF with full pomp and circumstance, including the flag flown at half-mast nationwide, official vigil, a lying-in-state, and four days of national mourning.

But that’s just the beginning of the death jamboree. Official Funerals cover the spouse of the serving President and Deputy President, all serving Ministers and Deputy Ministers, the Speaker and Deputy Speaker, the Chief and Deputy Chief Justice, the President of the Supreme Court, the Chair and Deputy Chair of the National Council of Provinces, and all provincial Premiers. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s latest Cabinet has 75 people who now all qualify for a final ritzy ride to eternal repose.

All these funeral categories are replicated, with the equivalent provincial ranks, across the nine provinces. That’s a lot of people. For example, there are 90 serving Members of the Executive Council alone.

And in case this doesn’t quite encompass every apparatchik who has ever held some kind of high office, or somehow pleased the ruling party, the President can declare anybody they wish as having the “extraordinary” or alternatively “distinguished” credentials that open the lid, so to speak, to a Special Official Funerals, category one or two. 

This presidential discretion has been put to use at least three times so far this year, with the funerals of Pravin Gordhan, who retired last year as Minister of Public Enterprises, Tito Mboweni, who was Minister of Finance from 2018 to 2021, and Shepherd Mdladlana, who was a not particularly talented Minister of Labour from 1998 to 2010. Wikipedia has an incomplete list of about three dozen people who have had these kinds of state funerals in the ANC era.

Needless to say, all costs for these funerals, whatever specific category they fall into, are paid for by the state. That includes internment costs, structures required for the public ceremonies, travel costs of the family and special guests, food and drink and any other “reasonable” costs. The Presidency’s manual instructs that if “the costs of a funeral exceed the budget of the said department, this expenditure must be provided for during the Adjustment Appropriation”. In other words, die now, pay later and the drinks are on us, boys.

The 20818 SF of Zola Skweyiya, Minister of Social Development in the Thabo Mbeki administration and then UK High Commissioner for five years, cost, as best can be established from the murky accounts, at least R29 million. In the same year, the SF funeral of the child-abusing criminal, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, cost at least R37 million. The hire of chairs, couches and scatter cushions, alone, came to R7 million. Despite a public outcry and threats of criminal charges, nothing happened and the company involved, Crocia Events — motto, surely, We Bury the Evidence — is still seemingly in business. 

Although the costs of SFs have since supposedly been brought under control, it is difficult to know for sure. Payments are obscured and difficult to unravel because they are concealed in the accounts of several government departments. The Presidency, Public Works, Department of Transport,  Department of International Relations and Cooperation, SA Police Service, SA National Defence Force, State Security Agency, Government Communication and Information System, as well as their provincial counterparts, may all be involved, each through their own budgets, in the costs of a SF. 

In South Africa, the State Funeral, far from being the ultimate honour of a grateful nation, is just another tawdry bauble in the ANC bangle. It’s the ultimate example of the ostentation, self-importance and corruption that have become the defining characteristics of a morally impoverished ruling party.

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