Déjà vu at the Zondo show
Judge Raymond Zondo is certainly not the first to take charge of a commission into state capture in SA. Matthew Blackman and Nick Dall delve into some of the frightening, sometimes farcical, attempts to hold the powerful to account in their coming book ‘Rogues’ Gallery: An Irreverent History of Corruption in SA, from the VOC to the ANC’
In 1706, the bosses of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company) in the Netherlands held an inquiry into governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel’s corrupt administration at the Cape.
While Van der Stel was a company employee, not a political appointee, his kleptocratic fiefdom at Vergelegen bore all the hallmarks of state capture. Not only did Van der Stel gift himself the land Vergelegen was established on and use company labour and materials to develop it into the largest agricultural operation at the Cape, he also sold its produce back to the company at prices he controlled. And this from a man who was forbidden by the VOC to own “larger gardens or a greater number of cattle than required for the use of own household”.
Eventually, Adam Tas and 62 other farmers in Stellenbosch plucked up the courage to send a detailed list of complaints to the Netherlands. “You are informed that the governor has built, about 12 hours distant from the Cape, a country seat, large beyond measure, and of such broad dimensions, as if it were a whole town,” was the first of 38 grievances. But before they could smuggle their petition onto a ship, Van der Stel got hold of a copy.
So he threw a party, with loads of free booze and tobacco, where he coerced hundreds of Cape citizens into signing a certificate attesting that he was “a person of all honour and virtue in his whole conduct”. Then he tossed the complainants in the dungeons of Cape Town castle and tortured many of them into recanting their accusations.
Incredibly, VOC officials in the Netherlands saw the recantations for what they were and ordered Van der Stel home. As a result, Vergelegen was divided into four farms and sold by auction in October 1709. “To avoid setting an example of ostentation,” writes Graham Viney, the VOC insisted that the manor house be demolished and, curiously, the materials sold for Van der Stel’s
benefit. Modern examination of Vergelegen’s foundations suggests that the purchaser sidestepped these instructions and neglected to demolish much of the house. Van der Stel died in Lisse in 1733, a disgraced but wealthy man.
Somerset’s theft
In July 1823 John Bigge and William Colebrooke arrived in the Cape as heads of the Commission of Eastern Inquiry. Their commission was instituted because of the growing public criticisms in British colonies of “old corruption” — or as historian Kirsten McKenzie describes it, the diverting of money “into the pockets of a narrow political clique whose only claim to privileged status was its proximity to the sources of patronage”.
At the centre of these practices at the Cape was governor Lord Charles Somerset. Even before the inquiry the government secretary, Col Bird (of Kirstenbosch bath fame), sent the Cape’s finances to Britain. These revealed Somerset’s misappropriations or “overdrawn money”.
On arriving in London for a sabbatical in 1820, Somerset was confronted about his spending by the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst. He later complained to Bird: “The auditors have come to the subject of my salary. I think I have managed badly. I went to Lord Bathurst and the decision is, I am to pay half.”
After several more reports reached the colonial office with evidence that Somerset was treating the Cape as a private possession, Bathurst sent the commission to the Cape. When it arrived, Somerset went all out to pamper Bigge and Colebrooke. He accommodated them lavishly in Government House and sent them invitations to join him on hunts, to attend race meetings and to sample the luxuries of the government farm at Groote Post, which he had effectively taken as his own. The commissioners, however, steadfastly declined these offers.
Somerset then wrote to Bathurst saying he found the commission “degrading” to his rank and station. Bathurst wrote back: “Servants of the crown are alike bound to vindicate themselves, when their conduct in the service of the public is impeached.” Simply put, Bathurst demanded that Somerset appear before the commissioners.
By this stage, several people had testified to Somerset’s corruption. One of his tricks was to sell horses privately at inflated prices to people who wanted free government land.
As the commissioners stated: “There is an unfortunate coincidence that the parties concerned in the treaty for the horses were in both instances at the same time applying for land grants, and it is to be lamented that under such circumstances you did not impose upon yourself a circumspection which would have set malevolence at defiance.”
In 1826 Somerset was forced to return to London to explain his actions, leaving the Cape in a state of bankruptcy. However, after he was threatened with impeachment, Bathurst, a fellow Tory, wrote to him to say: “As you will be attacked upon party principles … you are entitled to party support.” And it was the unfailing support of the Tory party that would save him.
Unsurprisingly, Somerset was never impeached.
Big bang theory
In the 1890s, a commission into Edouard Lippert’s decidedly dodgy dynamite concession threatened to blow Paul Kruger’s corrupt administration of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) into the open.
In an attempt to stimulate the republic’s economy, Kruger had introduced a concessions policy whereby one individual was granted a monopoly on the production of a particular product. When gold was
discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886 and the ZAR’s economy was transformed, Kruger clung to the outmoded policy.
Being the only supplier to the world’s largest dynamite market, Lippert had a licence to print money. While his agreement with the government stipulated he must produce the ontplofbare stoffen (explosive material) on ZAR soil, he had a better idea. He would import the dynamite from Europe and simply repackage it as “Made in the ZAR”.
Soon rumours of his skulduggery abounded. While the first commission of inquiry that was appointed found nothing amiss, the complaints continued. Eventually the government was forced to look into the dynamite’s origin more carefully and appointed a second commission.
During a tea break in this inquiry, members of Kruger’s Volksraad gathered in central Pretoria to see whether Lippert really was importing non-explosive “raw materials”.
The answer was emphatic. As Eugène Marais’s newspaper Land en Volk reported: “The stuff that Mr Lippert alleged was not dynamite exploded with terrific force, throwing great masses of rock into the air.”
As a result of these revelations the dynamite concession was restructured by Kruger. Lippert, however, retained 25,000 shares. Between 1894 and
Grand (apartheid) larceny
When the Rev Beyers Naudé in 1963 leaked papers of the secret Broederbond organisation into the public domain, the English-language newspapers and parliament were awash with revelations and debate. The Broederbond was said to control the government as well as a network of businesses and banks that benefited from government patronage systems. The parliamentary opposition demanded a public inquiry into what in contemporary terms would be called state capture.
Prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, a Broeder bonder himself, agreed to an inquiry so long as it also included investigations into the Freemasons, the Sons of England and Anglo American.
After several months Verwoerd finally made the commission official — although he dropped Anglo American from the remit. On June 9 1964, he announced that a one-man commission under apartheid appointee judge DH Botha would investigate the three secret organisations.
Stanley Uys of the Sunday Times stated at the time that, as a member of the Broederbond, “the prime minister should have recused himself from the whole situation. He should not have appointed the judge, defined the terms of reference, or stated the conditions under which the commission should operate.”
Verwoerd had stipulated that the commission would collect its evidence in camera. This was in direct contravention of the Commissions Act, which stated that commissions had to be held in public. The National Party then quickly pushed through legislation to change this law. Botha’s inquiry into a secret organisation took place in secret. It later turned out that Botha’s two assistants were high-ranking members of the Broederbond.
After the commission ended, Botha called the
Funding fake news Fast forward to the late 1970s and a little-known judge by the name of Anton Mostert who was running a one-man commission of inquiry into exchange-control violations. When Mostert subpoenaed the fertiliser baron Louis Luyt (later president of the South African Rugby Union) he uncovered what would become known as the information scandal. At the root of this was a mind-boggling secret propaganda programme that peddled fake news across the globe and engaged in staggering acts of corruption and graft.
When he went public with some of his findings after a heated private confrontation with the then prime minister PW Botha, Mostert had his commission cancelled. As Rand Daily Mail editor Allister Sparks put it, Botha then appointed “a more compliant judge” in judge Rudolph Erasmus “to prevent any further publication of the scandal under the sub judice rule”.
After two sets of findings, Eschel Rhoodie, who had been the administrative puppet master behind it
all, was extradited from France to face charges. Rhoodie was found guilty and sentenced to six years in jail. However, the conviction was later overturned by the appeal court in Bloemfontein.
The only person to walk away with a criminal record from the scandal was Sparks. He was fined for publishing an article that contravened the commission’s rules.
Separate embezzlement
What might come as a surprise is that some of SA’s more effective corruption commissions were those into the notoriously corrupt “independent” homelands.
In a public hearing into “cross-border” crimes committed between SA and the Transkei, one Herman Visser testified that, to secure a housing contract, his construction firm paid George Matanzima, the prime minister of Transkei, “lobola” of R1m (R10.2m in today’s money).
The payment had been made in two instalments. The second, a cash payment of R500,000, was presented to Matanzima in a tattered cardboard box by Visser’s brother-in-law.
These revelations set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to Bantu Holomisa seizing control of the Transkei in a bloodless coup. Under Holomisa’s clean administration, Matanzima was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to nine years in prison. The three years he ended up serving are a lot longer than any other senior leader in our history has served.
In 1995, in the newly democratic SA, the Skweyiya commission of inquiry into corrupt practices and irregular use of public funds in Bophuthatswana uncovered what it termed an “extraordinary web of corruption and misuse of public money by Lucas Mangope and top government officials”.
The former homeland president was found guilty of 102 counts of theft and fraud totalling R3.54m (R11.7m today). Despite the severity of the crimes, the trial judge mysteriously allowed Mangope to avoid jail time by simply paying back (some of) the money.
Apartheid’s last days
Near the end of apartheid, several commissions of inquiry were set up by the new broom that was President FW de Klerk.
In 1991 judge Benjamin Pickard was appointed to head an inquiry after a parliamentary budget committee discovered that R50m (R342m today) from the department of development aid’s budget had been misappropriated. As Pickard stated in his findings: “Public officials felt they were missing out if they were not helping themselves.” Pickard discovered that tender fraud was rampant and nepotism rife. On the publication in 1992 of his report, the ANC demanded the setting up of “an independent commission into corruption and state expenditure — at all levels of government”. Several officials were arrested and charged but nobody was found guilty.
Lessons learnt?
Few of these commissions ended in any significant prosecutions of the corrupters in question and only Matanzima ever donned orange overalls.
Just what will come of deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo’s findings is impossible to say, but the outcomes will certainly not be any worse than those that preceded his commission.