It was the acts of omission and not just the crimes of commission that allowed state capture to flourish.
These words, spoken by evidence leader advocate Vas Soni in relation to state capture at the Passenger Rail Authority of SA (Prasa), should have rung in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ears after he spent the better part of Wednesday trying to shift the blame for corruption far away from his own shoulders.
Nobody was fooled. Gently but relentlessly Soni and his colleague Pule Seleka, as well as acting chief justice Raymond Zondo, stripped away Ramaphosa’s denials of knowledge of what had been going on underneath his nose, with an endless list of questions on events at state-owned enterprises on which he had failed to act.
Ramaphosa was ANC and SA deputy president from 2014 to 2018 when the worst excesses of the Jacob Zuma administration played out. Central to this was the plunder of state-owned enterprises through the appointment and protection of corrupt executives and directors and the collapse of governance, which enabled ministerial intervention and facilitation of corruption.
The case of Prasa showed up Ramaphosa not just as someone without the political spine to act in difficult circumstances but also as someone with the gall to excuse his own behaviour by blaming the victim of the crime afterwards.
Soni gave an account of how Popo Molefe, chair of the board of Prasa, had given evidence to show that in his attempts to fight rampant corruption at Prasa he had hit a brick wall with the minister at the time, Dipuo Peters. Molefe had then approached the top six of the ANC in July or August of 2015 and appealed for their support to carry out his duties. Ramaphosa told Soni that Molefe had “received nothing else but support”.
But Molefe had earlier in the commission’s hearings told Zondo that he received nothing at all. After being listened to by the top six, Molefe was told by the meeting that it needed time to consider the information and would come back to him. But it never did.
This was because, said Ramaphosa, as board chair Molefe had all the power and instruments he needed to sort this problem out.
“I find it disingenuous for someone who has been clothed with all the power, that someone who is a chair of (the) entity would say ‘I’m powerless, and I need your support’ when they should have gone ahead and done (what was necessary),” he said.
While Ramaphosa might have thought, as he said, that was the end of the matter, Soni informed him that it was not. After the meeting, Zuma called Molefe and told him to reinstall CEO Lucky Montana, whom he had suspended, in his position. This, Ramaphosa told Zondo, he was shocked to hear.
Crimes of omission were also multiple when it came to Eskom. Though Ramaphosa had been deployed by Zuma to be the head of an interministerial committee on Eskom, and to oversee “the war room” which was to end load-shedding, he was alarmingly unconcerned at incidents that took place at the company, which was his biggest responsibility.
While in charge of the war room, four of Eskom’s executives were summarily suspended by public enterprises minister Lynne Brown. Three of the four were later worked out of the organisation, with no case being made against them.
Was Ramaphosa not concerned about this surprising turn of events?
“Did you not think there was something untoward? You were in charge of Eskom, did this give rise to any suspicions on your part,” asked Zondo.
Not at the time, replied Ramaphosa, who said his response had been to suggest to Zuma that they close down the war room, as there were too many points of contact with Eskom and the government was messing up. After washing his hands of the affair, Ramaphosa also suggested appointing Transnet CEO Brian Molefe as Eskom chief. It must have been “a coincidence” he said, that the Guptas had many months before foreseen Molefe’s move.
Earlier in the day, in his opening statement to the commission, Ramaphosa said that as deputy president of SA, having become aware of state capture, he had five options: “resign; speak out; acquiesce and abet; keep quiet and remain silent; or remain and resist, hoping that we could turn things around.”
His choice, he said, had been to remain as deputy president and “not to resign, not acquiesce and not to be confrontational”. He decided to “resist abuses” and “stay in the arena” as “it was the course of action that had the greatest likelihood of bringing state capture to an end, restoring the institutions of state and defending our democracy”.
Ramaphosa may still believe that his chosen course of action was for the best. But the nine wasted years, as he once referred to Zuma’s rule, were very expensive for SA. The commission, in its final report, may well decide differently.
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