MCKINSEY LAST MAN STANDING

rian Molefe. Ben Ngubane. Bell Pottinger. Zethembe Khoza. Anoj Singh. Jacob Zuma. Matshela Koko. Lynne Brown. Chwayita Mabude. Viroshini Naidoo. Pathmanathan Naidoo. Mark Pamensky. Venete Klein. The New Age. ANN7. Mckinsey & Company. Of this disreputable bunch, only the last two remain standing.

In the case of television propaganda channel ANN7, its imminent and most welcome demise is about five weeks away. Multichoice, the pay-television platform that is owned by Naspers, will boot the Gupta channel off its Dstv platform when its licence expires at the end of August.

It goes without saying, of course that Naspers should never have allowed space to the Gupta family mouthpiece in the first place. But Naspers’s inflexible desire to protect its pay television platform from competition got the better of its judgment. This notwithstanding Naspers’s post-1994 Damascene moment in which it pledged, through then-chair Ton Vosloo, “never again to take sides” in politics.

Vosloo bound Naspers to neutrality purely because the company realised, in fact had known all along, that it had chosen the wrong side in making itself the mouthpiece of the racist government, helping it entrench and perpetuate apartheid, declared a crime against humanity by the progressive world.

All ANN7 and its newspaper stablemate The New Age did — the purpose for which they were established — was to spew racist, divisive bile into SA’S living rooms. They helped polarise even further a divided nation that had not emerged from the big dark hole into which apartheid had plunged it.

To curry favour with the Zuma government, which was toying with the idea of opening up the pay television industry to more competition, Naspers got into bed with a force — the Guptas — whose sole purpose

Bwas to provide cover to the corrupt Zuma regime and use their so-called media outlets as a weapon against democracy. The Guptas were as ugly as the apartheid government that Naspers had propped up with its newspapers and television technology. Greed won. As nauseating as the Gupta method of taking taxpayer funds (meant for service delivery and public broadcasting) to pay for its evil media empire was, so was Naspers’s charging of its pay-television subscribers (I’m glad I was not one of them) to prop up the thieving project that is ANN7. Be that as it may ...

Chameleons still at work

One by one, all these pillars of the state-capture project have now fallen by the wayside. A few chameleons are still hard at work disguising themselves as patriotic corporate citizens and loyal public servants. But the tide is out. The days of the remaining key components of the state-capture project, like ANN7, or whatever “owner” Mzwanele Jimmy Manyi wants to call it in its dying days, are numbered.

Peace-loving and progressive citizens, be they consumers of Multichoice’s pay television platforms or taxpayers propping up Mckinsey’s besuited shysters, should only be satisfied when the last vestiges of state capture have gone the way of The New Age, Bell Pottinger and Brian Molefe: into history’s ugly dustbin.

Of course the main perpetrators of the project, the Guptas and their employee Jacob Zuma, are enjoying the proceeds of their ill-gotten gains. Not even the foot soldiers are worried about the law. Not yet.

But nothing lasts forever. Just as their hegemony over the state came to an end not so long ago, so shall the good times they are enjoying, away from justice. Sometimes the good guys do win. Mckinsey will probably be the first to find out. FBI investigators keep visiting SA, following up on the corruption charges laid by Corruption Watch last year.

But nothing lasts forever. Sometimes the good guys do win. Mckinsey will probably be the first to find out