Two thirds of the state capture inquiry’s findings are now in the public domain and the list of implicated politicians is stacking up, among them former president Jacob Zuma and several disgraced ministers, including Malusi Gigaba and Lynne Brown.
Minerals & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has also come under fire in the second part of the report published this week and sent to President Cyril Ramaphosa after more than three years of public hearings chaired by acting chief justice Raymond Zondo. The volumes detail racketeering — illegally co-ordinated schemes to fraudulently amass wealth — and cash bribes and irrational appointments to state-owned entities to further a political project to steal the country’s wealth.
Many familiar characters feature in the state capture project, including the now-blacklisted Gupta brothers and Salim Essa, Eric Wood of Regiments, one-time CFO at Transnet Anoj Singh, former Transnet CEO Brian Molefe, former CEO of Transnet’s freight division Siyabonga Gama, and former Denel board chair Daniel Mantsha, who Zuma later hired as his attorney.
It will be months before parliament officially receives the final tome and Ramaphosa proclaims his action plan. He is set to do so in the midst of what will be a challenging year, not least because his party goes to conference to decide its leadership in December.
With the sections on Denel and Transnet made public, it is only a matter of time before questions as to the efficacy of the inquiry emerge anew. SA has, with reason, a rather jaundiced view of inquiries. They are near-set pieces of public life, addled with cons and without many pros.
Cynics can hardly be blamed when impunity persists as dime-a-dozen commissions play out in the public domain. Suspected corruption at the Public Investment Corporation? The purposeful gutting of the SA Revenue Service? Bloodshed on the koppies of Marikana a decade ago? Bring in the inquiries.
Almost 20 years ago, legal scholar Sir Jeffrey Jowell was sceptical about commissions of inquiry, particularly those chaired by judges. His column, which appeared in The Guardian, warned against mixing judges with politics.
“It is not difficult to see why, for politicians, a judicial inquiry is useful,” he wrote in 2004. Jowell suggested a judge chairing a commission offers “symbolic reassurance” to the public. That suggests dispassionate investigation will ensue and “the heat is drawn” from a matter, albeit temporarily.
Jowell was writing about a different commission of inquiry in a different time and place. But several of his points transpose rather well to SA in 2022, when considering Zondo’s report.
The notion that a sitting judge — with ongoing judicial work, supported by a modest team of lawyers and several investigators — could solve the riddle of state capture and ensure justice, beggars belief.
The great political project to dismantle SA piece by piece was so calculated that some imagined there may have been an actual chart on the wall of one upmarket Johannesburg mansion showing the scheme to slice up government like a pie.
State capture was, as was often emphasised, far more ambitious, one might even argue far more sinister, than SA’s run-of-the-mill corruption and fraud. Hard at work was a large cast of perpetrators here and abroad.
This conspiracy of capturers reached into the very presidency itself. The embodiment of state capture includes a Gupta brother in Mahlamba Ndlopfu, the president’s residence, hailing a minister from a nearby ANC conference and chiding her.
Capturers sought to shred the delicate fabric of a developing state. The strategy was — and, best beware, could well still be — to tear that down one institution at a time, whether it is the executive, legislature or judiciary. Ministries, SOEs and their boards, law enforcement agencies — all came into the firing line.
Commissions of inquiry have less than dazzling reputations, in part due to a public misconceptions that they are like courts of law. In contrast with a resignation, they achieve nothing of true substance.
Paradoxically, then, Zondo’s work might ignite fierce and righteous public outrage, with the insistence that elected officials have no choice but to act swiftly and decisively.
With that, we can’t wait for part three.
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