Daily Dispatch
Join the dots, Mr Gigaba
JOIN the dots, Pravin Gordhan urged the public after he was sacked as finance minister along with his deputy, Mcebisi Jonas. He was of course, referring to the then not so visible parallel structure operating behind the facade of the state and skimming off, not millions, but billions in revenue for the benefit of a tiny elite.
The resistance of the Treasury’s two respected gatekeepers to this machinery was almost certainly the reason that President Jacob Zuma swept them out of his Cabinet little more than two months ago, inducing a ratings downgrade to junk status.
At the time their replacements at Treasury – Minister Malusi Gigaba and deputy Sifiso Buthelezi – had reputations for the wrong reasons. These chiefly related to linkages with the Gupta family.
But at the stage these were merely dots on a page of random dots. There was no clear picture.
Fast-forward to the present and an academic study, a SA Council of Churches corruption TRC and Guptaleaks have supplied so many dots it is hard to keep track.
The picture however, now in increasingly sharp focus is one of extensive state capture.
In any functional democracy detailed revelations about the sale of a country’s sovereignty would see that government leap into action – to explain, investigate, flush out the compromised and possibly send those people to jail.
Yet in South Africa the opposite has happened. The agency that is supposed to investigate – the Hawks – is being taken to court to get them to do what they should long ago have been relentlessly busy with.
The person entrusted with protecting the public, Busisiwe Mkhwebane, is awol.
And the man charged with safeguarding the public purse is revealed as having populated the state machinery with cronies.
This week it emerged that Gigaba was also the one to say Open Sesame to the family at the nexus of the state capture network.
Gigaba has admitted to waving open the doors of South Africa by granting citizenship to the Guptas. They have used the state as their personal tool for business and enrichment, perusing the CVs of candidates for government and Cabinet positions, using home affairs officials as personal travel agents, repeatedly landing their private aircraft at national keypoints, hijacking coal mines in cahoots with Cabinet ministers and SoEs, and so monstrously inflating prices on supply deals that criminal investigations should long have been under way.
In the process this family together with members of the Zuma family have made a fortune with so many digits that ordinary people struggle to read the figures.
Confronted, Gigaba showed the first sign of choking. He claimed he had done nothing wrong but in the next breath sought to redirect the attention of this bankrupted nation elsewhere. People should rather be focusing on the economy, he said.
What audacity. Gigaba knows full well that a primary reason for the country being in the economic poop up to its neck is the rampaging state capture machinery.
South Africans do not need to be told to focus on the economy – the majority feel its bite every day. But if the minister was to take the advice of his predecessor and join the dots, they could lead him to the hard consequences of a captured state – the closed doors of East London children’s homes which the government can no longer afford to fund.