Cyril has a corruption battle on his hands
THE past weekend marked a year since the Sunday Times published the first of the Gupta e-mails, prompting the release of an avalanche of information about the mass looting and sinister dealings of the state capture network.
Over the next months, South Africa waded through a deluge of evidence published by a number of media organisations, showing how the Gupta family and their subordinates, including Duduzane Zuma, interfered in political decision-making and used their access to power to plunder state-owned companies.
When people read the Sunday Times on May 28 2017, they could not have guessed that a year later the Guptas would no longer be behaving like South Africa's royal family, but be fugitives from justice.
Back then, it would have been even more astounding to imagine that Jacob Zuma would be out of office, on trial for corruption and hustling to pay his legal fees.
One person who ought not to have been surprised when he picked up the Sunday Times last year is President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa had been deputy president for three years by then and sat through cabinet meetings where Zuma and several ministers tried to take action on instruction from the Guptas.
He had also been ANC deputy president for more than four years and would have been in numerous ANC top six and national executive committee meetings where state capture was contested.
Ramaphosa was in the middle of two crucial matters that were highlights of the state capture project. These were the attempted heists of the National Treasury, first through the firing of Nhlanhla Nene in December 2015, and then via the axing of Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas in March 2017.
Ramaphosa protested at both – in the case of the latter he objected to Zuma's reshuffle publicly.
“I am especially unhappy about the firing of Gordhan and his deputy, to which the financial markets will react negatively. I think it is totally unacceptable that he [Zuma] fired someone like Gordhan, who has served the country excellently, for his own gain and survival,” Ramaphosa said at the time. He told the media he had expressed his dissatisfaction to Zuma and “told him I was going to express my unhappiness to the public at large”.
Behind the scenes, Ramaphosa was fighting Zuma on many issues, including attempts to help the Guptas reopen their bank accounts. Ramaphosa opposed the efforts by then mineral resources minister Mosebenzi Zwane to have the cabinet appoint an inquiry into the banks, to turn up the heat on the financial sector.
How, then, could Ramaphosa claim this week that he did not know the scale of state capture until the publishing of the Gupta e-mails?
He said when the media published reports of corruption at state-owned entities such as Eskom, he thought these were isolated incidents “[where] maybe it's just a wheel nut that has gone loose”.
“But when the Gupta e-mails came out it became clear that the wheels have actually come off completely,” Ramaphosa told a South African National Editors Forum meeting on Thursday.
It is somewhat incredible that the president thought the firing of two finance ministers to give the Guptas control of the Treasury was just a loose nut.
Perhaps Ramaphosa said this to fend off criticism that he had been a spectator to state capture and was explicit in his opposition only during his campaign to become ANC president.
“Could I have done anything differently? Possibly, but we are where we are now, where we are all able to take action. We have a commission that is going to look at this, let's look forward to all that,” he said.
According to Judge Raymond Zondo and the team leading the state capture commission, the process will be complex and will take up to two years.
This is a long time before South Africa gets to the bottom of the state capture project. There is no telling whether, after that, there will be prosecutions and the recovery of some of the money lost.
We also do not know whether the Guptas and their cohorts will be brought to justice or continue to flit around the world.
We have seen in the past how other commissions, such as the Marikana inquiry and the arms deal probe, were employed by Zuma as time-wasting exercises.
Prosecutions on state capture do not need to wait until the end of the commission. There is sufficient information in the public domain, including that contained in the Gupta e-mails, to pursue these cases – provided an effective national director of public prosecutions is appointed.
With Ramaphosa’s 100th day in office, there is no doubt he has achieved much in a short time, including making crucial changes in the cabinet and state-owned companies, setting in motion a massive investment drive, and turning around the national sentiment.
North West premier Supra Mahumapelo was forced to resign, dislodging another enabler of state capture.
But South Africa can only leave the Zuma era behind when the corruption networks are completely broken, the criminals are brought to book and there is a reorientation of the state.
● This article first appeared in the Sunday Times