ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PIETER-LOUIS Myburgh is an award-winning investigative journalist. He has done work on multibillion-rand contracts at the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa (Prasa); shady intelligence projects at the State Security Agency (SSA); and the #Guptaleaks. He is the author of the best-selling The Republic of Gupta. Myburgh is a member of Scorpio, the Daily Maverick’s celebrated investigations team. Commission of Inquiry heard evidence from a National Treasury official who confirmed that Magashule’s Free State had made a hugely disproportionate contribution to the Guptas’ media empire. Jan Gilliland’s data showed that the province had poured nearly R80m into The New Age and Infinity Media Networks between 2011 and mid-2018. By comparison, Kwazulu-natal, Jacob Zuma’s home province and the second-biggest spender, spent just R25m on media services from the two companies.

Magashule’s official diary shows the amount of direct contact he had with The New Age bosses. In May 2013, for instance, he had the following appointment scheduled for two different days:

“Meeting with NEW AGE (Ms [sic] Nazeem Howa & Mr Ricky Naidoo)”. Howa, who is definitely not a woman, was the newspaper’s CEO and Naidoo was its politics editor before he later became editor-in-chief. And in early July 2013, Magashule had this engagement in his schedule: “Premier meets The New Age”. All three of these meetings took place at the premier’s office in Bloemfontein, according to the diary. The Guptas seemingly used Magashule’s Free State as a testing laboratory for their state-capture schemes, which involved more than just their media ventures. Mediosa, a Gupta-linked supplier of high-tech mobile medical units, achieved notoriety mostly due to reports of dodgy contracts in Premier Supra Mahumapelo’s North West province. According to City Press, the North West Health Department awarded the company a contract worth R180m in early 2017 for mobile units that were superfluous to the province’s needs. This included an upfront prepayment of R30m.

But Mediosa’s operations were, in fact, first rolled out in the Free State. Cureva, as Mediosa was known before it changed its name, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Free State Department of Health in 2015. The two parties then signed a contract in early 2016 for the provision of primary healthcare services in rural areas at a cost of R954 per patient, the same rate Mediosa later offered North West. Documents in the #Guptaleaks reveal that Cureva/mediosa would forward R650 of each per patient payment to what appeared to be Gupta front companies in Dubai. By March 2018, the Free State Health Department had splurged R25m on the Gupta-linked firm’s services.

A source from the Free State Department of Health provided shocking details on how Mediosa ripped off taxpayers. This government healthcare worker was based in the eastern Free State’s Maluti-a-phofung local municipality, one of the early pilot sites for the mobile units.

“Mediosa’s staff would come into our hospital and take pills, other medicines and basic consumables like bandages,” he told me.

In other words, the company’s mobile clinics were leeching off government facilities in the areas it was servicing. This would partly explain how Mediosa could afford to ship the bulk of its revenues to Gupta-linked companies abroad.

More terrifying, the Free State and North West were just the starting points for the scheme. Another document from the #Guptaleaks shows that Mediosa intended rolling out its services in nearly all of South Africa’s nine provinces. By doing so, the firm projected that it would rake in revenues of about R1 billion a year. But the national roll-out of the Mediosa scheme was seemingly halted by the changing political landscape and the concurrent demise of the Gupta family’s business empire in South Africa.

¡ Gangster State: Unravelling Ace Magashule’s Web of Capture is available at all good bookstores and retails for R290.