Let’s start this out by saying that, like former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene, trade and industry minister Rob Davies is a fundamentally decent man. There’s integrity there, and it was no surprise that when asked in a parliamentary question from the DA whether he had ever met with the fugitive Gupta family he did not hesitate to say that, indeed, he had, and on numerous occasions.
It’s important he said that because the only reason Nene had to resign after telling the Zondo commission into state capture that he too had met the Guptas a few times and had tea at their home was because he had earlier told a TV interviewer he barely knew them. That wasn’t true, and the country is in no mood to tolerate any more lies or spin.
Davies’s more forthright initial answer, however, will also get him into trouble. It has a “so what if I met them?” quality to it. He met a lot of business people, he said, and Helen Zille had also been to their house.
What Zille has to do with it I don’t know, but the question for Davies is not whether he met lots of “other” business and investor types. The question is how many thieves he met with so regularly. Davies said he met the Guptas “on a number of occasions between 2009 and 2013”. Did he not, at any stage during those five years of numerous meetings, have any idea that the Guptas might be up to no good?
When did it dawn on one of the longest-serving ANC ministers that this family was poison to our country? In 2013? That’s the year he attended the Gupta wedding at Sun City, the one that ended in embarrassment and fiasco after it became clear the Guptas had used an air force base to land a planeload of guests from India.
Is that when the mists may have lifted a little from the ministerial eyes? Davies was there from the start. He was in government when the Guptas bought off old Essop Pahad with easily the most boring magazine since the invention of mechanised printing.
He was on the fateful 2010 Jacob Zuma state visit to India that was hijacked by the Guptas and ended with Barbara Hogan being shafted as public enterprises minister because she wouldn’t entertain Gupta pressure to pull SA Airways off the profitable Johannesburg-Mumbai route so they could have it.
Davies knew all of that was going on. In fact, if I remember correctly Zuma, who kept being bundled into rooms by the Guptas to meet their associates, was cross with Davies because the department of trade & industry (DTI), in Zuma’s view, had fumbled the arrangements it was responsible for.
In his answer to the DA, Davies said the Guptas had used their time with him to press for speed on an application they had made for funds from the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) for a mining project. Davies said he referred them to officials doing the assessment but lost touch with the application as Zuma split the IDC off into Ebrahim Patel’s new economic development department.
Nonetheless, Davies’s interactions with the Guptas could reasonably be described as pretty damned frequent. Much more than Nene’s. He was a dinner guest, with his wife, at the Gupta compound “on very few occasions”. They chatted about starting a newspaper. Once on a visit to Mumbai the Guptas invited him to a factory they owned. He obviously thought these were real businessmen, real investors.
That sort of judgment shows in what he has been able to achieve in industrial growth in the last decade. None of which, probably, will get Davies fired. He stood up for Mcebisi Jonas when he said the Guptas had tried to bribe him, but he has to have been pretty thick all those five years not to have picked up the stench of obsequious Gupta greed his own communist breeding would have naturally abhorred.
Davies says he is ready to testify before the Zondo commission. Good, because there’s one thing I want Paul Pretorius, the commission’s evidence leader, to ask him about. And the answers will be critical to his legacy.
While the Guptas wanted funding for a uranium mine from the IDC when the corporation fell under Davies, what they also wanted from the DTI was a quota and licences to export scrap metal. It’s a dirty business at the best of times. For the Guptas, an export quota and a licence from the DTI would have been gold. There is no simpler way to launder illicit cash. Buy scrap for $1m in SA and sell it for $1m in Dubai. It’s magic money.
Will Davies please be sure to talk to the Zondo commission about the Guptas and scrap metal, particularly aluminium scrap. And if he doesn’t, will advocate Pretorius please ask him two questions: did the Guptas or any of their associates ever put pressure on DTI officials (or the minister) or apply for a quota and licences? And did they get a quota and licences?
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.